What the Water Washes Away

Margot sat on the rusted pier, her bare feet dangling over the Atlantic. The ocean water churned below, black and restless, reflecting the storm gathering in her chest. She'd come here every evening since the funeral—since she'd had to bear the weight of saying goodbye to forty years of shared mornings, shared silences.

A stray cat wound between her legs, its calico coat matted with seawater and regret. Margot had started leaving food for it three weeks ago, the day after she found Arthur's palm-reading kit in the attic. He'd kept it all these years, from before they met, when he'd been a different man with wandering hands and fortune-teller eyes.

"You're better at this than I am," he'd told her once, pressing her palm to his lips. The memory came unbidden, sharp as glass.

The cat mewed, pressing into the warmth of her side. Margot ran her thumb over the lines on her own palm—head line, heart line, life line. Arthur had taught her to read them, back when they still believed they could chart their own course. Now the lines just looked like cracks in a drying riverbed.

A car pulled into the driveway. Halogen headlights sliced through the dusk. Her son.

He'd want her to sell the house. To move into some sterile apartment where they'd monitor her medications and make sure she didn't fall in the shower. He'd say it was for her own good. He'd say she couldn't keep living alone with a dead husband's ghost and a stray cat for company.

Margot watched the water swallow the last light. She could sell. Could let strangers pack Arthur's books, could let the real estate agents erase the scuff marks where his wheelchair had tracked through the hallway. Could let them wipe away the life she'd built, the one she was still living in.

Or she could stay. Could bear the loneliness like the ocean bore the moon's pull—inexorable, ancient, necessary. Could keep learning to read the palm the universe had dealt her, lines etched by loss and enduring love.

The cat settled in her lap, purring against her belly. Tomorrow she'd call her son. She'd tell him she wasn't going anywhere. But tonight, she'd just sit here and let the darkness come, with the cat's heartbeat against her own and the water's rhythm in her ears, and remember what it felt like to be whole.