What Strays Remember

The cat—a ragged ginger tom with one torn ear—had been watching them for two days from beneath the pool deck. Maria had tried to coax it out with pieces of orange from her breakfast plate, but it only yawned, displaying yellowed fangs, and retreated deeper into the shadows.

"Give it up," David said, not looking up from his phone. "It's feral. Like everything else here."

Maria pressed her palm against the humid glass of their bungalow door, leaving a sweat-smudge. Everything here was too beautiful, too vibrant—the turquoise infinity pool that seemed to spill into the ocean, the palm trees swaying like drunks at closing time, the women in designer swimsuits who moved with the confidence of people whose lives had never cracked open.

This was supposed to be their second honeymoon, a twenty-fifth anniversary trip to restart something that had been dying for years. Instead, David spent hours at the bar, and Maria spent hours watching the cat and wondering when love had curdled into resentment.

Then came the dog—a golden retriever, someone's well-loved pet from the neighboring villa—chasing a wayward beach ball into the pool. It splashed joyfully, shaking water everywhere like rain from a storm. The cat emerged from beneath the deck, arched and spitting. The dog barked, tail wagging, oblivious to the hostility.

David laughed. It was the first time Maria had heard that sound in months.

"Remember when we were like that?" he asked. "Stupidly happy about nothing?"

Maria looked at him—at the deep lines around his mouth that she had once found handsome, at the gray hairs she had once helped him dye before he decided to "own it," at the man she had built a life with before realizing the life was built on sand.

"No," she said. "I don't think we ever were."

The dog's owner whistled, and it bounded away, leaving wet pawprints on the pristine wood. The cat slunk back to its shadows. David went back to his phone. Maria picked up her discarded orange slice and ate it, the bitter rind sharp against her tongue, the juice sticky on her fingers.

She would book her own flight home tomorrow. Some things, she realized, weren't meant to be domesticated.