Watermarks

Marcus stood at the edge of the pool, his **baseball** cap pulled low against the fluorescent glare. Forty-two and his cardiologist had handed him a prescription for **vitamin** D supplements and a recommendation to reduce stress, as if either could undo twenty years of eating at his desk and sleeping four hours a night.

The **swimming** pool had become his sanctuary. Six in the morning, before the office crowds arrived, before the divorce papers stopped feeling like foreign objects in his hands. He liked the silence underwater, the way his heartbeat thrummed in his ears like a second, more honest pulse.

"You're getting faster," Sarah said from the lane next to him. She was thirty-five, recently separated, with the kind of easy confidence that came from having nothing left to lose. They'd met at the **padel** courts—his attempt to prove he still possessed the social agility of his thirties. He'd been terrible at it. She'd laughed, not unkindly.

They'd ended up at a diner afterward, sharing a plate of something that came with an **orange** slice that had wilted against the hash browns. She'd talked about her ex-husband's gambling problem. He'd talked about his daughter choosing her mother's new boyfriend over him again. Neither had offered solutions. Sometimes, he was learning, that was the point.

Now she watched him towel off, water pooling around his bare feet on the concrete deck.

"My dad had a heart attack at forty-five," he said, the words tumbling out before he could check them. "Same age I'll be next month."

Sarah considered him. The fluorescent lights caught the wet strands of hair at her temples, silver and copper against the dark.

"My father died when I was nineteen," she said quietly. "Car accident. No warning, no chance to say anything I'd been saving up. You know what I'd give for a prescription? For something that might have given us more time?"

Marcus looked at his hands, the water rings on his wrists like fading ink. He thought about the vitamins in his bathroom cabinet, the forwarded emails from his lawyer, his daughter's last text message—a single thumbs-up emoji.

"You hungry?" he asked.

Sarah's smile was small, genuine. "Starved."

They walked out together into the orange spill of sunrise, leaving footprints that would evaporate before the next swimmers arrived.