What the Water Hides

The hotel pool was empty at 3 AM, which was exactly why Elena chose it. She floated on her back, letting the chlorine-stillness hold her, watching her hair fan out like dark seaweed beneath the surface. Thirty-eight years old and she'd never learned to swim properly. Always afraid of what waited underneath.

"You missed the funeral," David said from the edge, and she didn't need to turn to know he'd been drinking. His voice had that particular carefulness that meant he was trying not to slur. "Your mother's. You didn't come."

Elena closed her eyes. "I was busy."

"Busy?" He laughed, bitter and sharp. "Doing what exactly? Running away? Like you always do?"

She thought about the spinach garden her mother had tended every summer of Elena's childhood. How Elena had hated it—the dirt under her fingernails, the endless weeding, the way her mother would press raw leaves into her hands saying 'this is life, Elena, this is what sustains you.' Her mother had died still waiting for her to visit, still with bags of frozen spinach in the freezer, labeled with dates that stretched back years.

"I'm not running away," she said, though she was. They both were. Running from the mortgage they couldn't afford, from the bedroom that hadn't seen intimacy in eight months, from the future they'd stopped discussing because neither could imagine a version where they stayed together.

"Then come inside," David said, and for once his voice wasn't angry. Just tired. "Just come inside."

Elena pulled herself to the edge of the pool, water streaming from her hair and down her face like she was crying, though she wasn't. Not yet. David reached out his hand—rough, familiar, the hand that had once promised her everything. She thought about spinach leaves, how they could be sweet when they were young, how bitterness came with time. How some things, once they started to wither, could never become fresh again.

She didn't take his hand. She climbed out on her own, dripping and cold, and walked past him toward the hotel room where their separate beds waited. Behind her, the water settled back into silence, holding no trace of what had almost happened beneath its surface.