Watermark

The cat sat on the chain-link fence, watching them play padel with the bored precision of a creature who'd seen this routine a hundred times before. Elena wiped sweat from her forehead, her paddle slick against her palm. Marcus was winning, as always — his backhand crisp, his movements efficient, his emotional distance even sharper.

They'd met at this club three years ago. She'd been swimming in grief then, drowning in the aftermath of her mother's death, and Marcus had offered something that looked like a lifeline. Now she wondered if he'd simply thrown her an anchor.

'Your form's off,' he called from across the court, not unkindly. Never unkindly. That was the problem.

The cat meowed, a sound like tearing paper.

'Focus, El.'

She didn't want to focus. She wanted to be swimming — really swimming, in the ocean, in something vast and unknowable. Instead she was here, playing padel with a man who loved her in careful, measured doses, like water from a graduated cylinder.

Later, in the locker room, she caught her reflection in the mirror. She looked like someone swimming toward a shore that kept receding. The cat appeared in the doorway, slinking between her legs as she sat on the bench. It jumped up beside her, warm and alive and demanding nothing.

'Marcus is leaving,' she told the cat. 'He accepted that job in Singapore.'

The cat began to groom itself, indifferent to her crisis.

'He asked me to come with him.'

She remembered how she'd learned to swim as a child — her father throwing her into the deep end, trusting she'd figure it out. She had. She always had.

Outside, Marcus was waiting by his car, his paddle bag slung over his shoulder. He looked neat, prepared, already halfway to Singapore.

'Well?' he asked.

She thought of the cat, the one that watched them play padel with ancient, bored eyes. The one that stayed.

'I think,' Elena said, 'I'm done swimming in other people's currents.'

Marcus's expression didn't change, but something in his posture did. He nodded, once, and got into his car.

The cat appeared from the shadows, twining around her ankles. She picked it up, and for the first time in three years, felt entirely solid beneath her own feet.