What Remains in the Water

The papaya sat untouched on her room service tray, its orange flesh exposed like a wound she couldn't stop picking at. Elena hadn't ordered it. He must have—Mark, with his casual generosity that masked a hundred smaller cruelties. She remembered how he'd slice fruit for her in that kitchen in Barcelona, knife flashing through mango and papaya while he talked about his wife like she was a business arrangement rather than a person Elena had met at Christmas.

She walked down to the pool at sunset, the ritual three days running now. The resort's curved infinity edge dissolved into the Pacific, water turning bruised purple in the dying light. This was where they'd come, she and Mark, five years ago. When she'd been twenty-six and foolish enough to believe that loving someone unavailable was its own kind of integrity.

Her phone buzzed. Sarah. Again.

Elena had met Sarah at a coworking space in Mexico City last spring, another American adrift in Latin America, running from something she couldn't name. They'd become friends in that desperate, intimate way travelers do—sharing secrets and Ubers and fears they'd never tell people back home. Sarah was the only person who knew about Mark.

"He's in Curaçao," Sarah had written that morning. "Saw on his Instagram. You okay?"

Elena's palm pressed against the warm concrete at the pool's edge, feeling the heat still stored there from the day. The palm fronds above rustled in the evening breeze, throwing shadows across her bare legs. She could call Sarah back. She could book a flight. She could finally tell Mark's wife.

Instead she watched the pool's surface, seeing her own reflection fragment as the wind disturbed the water. The papaya on the tray upstairs would grow brown and soft. Some things, she was learning, had to rot before you could walk away.