Watermarks

The vitamin D supplement sat on her nightstand, a small amber tombstone marking the death of another month trying. Maria had taken them religiously, same time every morning, until last Tuesday when she'd left instead. Now the bottle remained sealed, mocking him.

David stood at the edge of the pool they'd built together last summer, the blue water undisturbed since her departure. The automatic cleaner still ran every morning at 6, scrubbing a pool no one used, moving with the relentless optimism they'd both possessed before the baby tests came back negative for the third time. He remembered how she'd floated here that first day, champagne in hand, saying they'd fill it with children someday. Now it was just a grave of chlorinated water reflecting a sky too bright for his mood.

His phone buzzed — the office betting pool. How long until David returns? How long until he files for divorce? The spreadsheet had become its own form of torture, his colleagues wagering on the dissolution of his marriage like it was a baseball game with clear innings and outcomes. Mike in accounting had put money on "never — they're solid," which was almost worse than the cynics.

He should go to work. Should sell those same useless vitamins to people who believed in miracles. But instead he knelt by the pool's edge, trailing his fingers through water that felt like liquid absence. The baseball from his son's league — the son they'd never had — lay in the grass nearby, another future abandoned.

What Maria hadn't understood was that he didn't need the child. He needed her. The vitamins, the treatments, the calendars tracking ovulation like some grim countdown — those had been for her. He would have spent a lifetime filling this pool with nothing but their own reflections.

He stood up, pocketing the baseball. It was time to stop letting others place bets on his life. Time to stop treating marriage like a game that could be lost or won. Time to swim in his own pool, however empty, or finally drain it and decide what came next. The vitamin bottle went into the trash. The spreadsheet went unanswered. Some things, he finally understood, couldn't be fixed with supplements or statistics or hope.