What Remains in the Water

The fluorescent lights hummed their eternal note, that sound only the exhausted can hear—the white noise of survival. Maya moved through the open-plan office like a zombie, not truly dead but not fully alive either, her body performing the motions of work while her mind was still three states away, watching her brother's casket lower into Illinois earth.

She'd flown back Sunday night. No one here knew. Why burden them?

"You look like hell," Chloe said, sliding into the chair beside her. "Rough weekend?"

"You could say that." Maya kept her eyes on her screen. The cursor blinked, waiting.

"Roger's goldfish died, by the way." Chloe nodded toward the break room. "The orange one. He's in there crying over it."

Maya almost laughed. A grown man weeping over a fish that had spent three years swimming in circles, forgetting everything every seven seconds. Lucky fish.

She'd been back to her apartment exactly once since returning. Her cat, Luna, had howled at the door, sensing the absence that filled the space. Andy's stuff was gone—packed up by his sister while Maya stood numb in the doorway. Just like that. Their bookshelf half-empty. His coffee mug missing from the hook. The silence so loud it rang in her ears.

He'd said he couldn't bear it anymore—her grief, her distance, the way the accident with her brother had hollowed her out. "I need someone who's present," he'd told her, and she couldn't even argue. She wasn't present. She was elsewhere, always, stuck in that hospital hallway where the doctor had shaken his head.

"Maya?" Chloe's voice cut through. "Did you hear me?"

"Sorry. What?"

"I asked if you want to grab dinner. You shouldn't be alone."

The kindness nearly broke her. That was the problem with kindness—it found the cracks and seeped in, heavy and drowning.

"I can't," she said. "Luna needs me."

Luna didn't need her. Luna needed food and water and occasionally to be let into the hallway to stalk imaginary prey. But Maya needed the weight of the cat on her chest at night, the solid warmth of something living and choosing to stay.

She would go home and feed Luna. She would sit on the couch that used to hold two. She would bear it, the way she bore everything now—quietly, carefully, as if her own life were something fragile she was carrying for someone else.

Tomorrow she would do it again. That was the thing about living: you kept doing it, even when you weren't sure why anymore.