What Water Remembers

The vitamin D supplement sat on the marble counter like a small white judgment. Sarah swallowed it dry, just as she'd swallowed every disappointment of the last three years.

She should have been asleep. Instead, she was at the hotel pool at 2 AM, wearing the expensive swimsuit Mark had bought her for their anniversary—the one he'd never seen her wear. The water stretched before her, an artificial expanse of turquoise that somehow felt more honest than her marriage.

Sarah had been running for months now. Literal miles on pavement, away from the condo where silence had become their only shared language, away from conversations about trying again, away from the realization that they'd become roommates who occasionally had pity sex.

"Couldn't sleep either?"

She jumped. A man in the adjacent lounge chair, half-obscured by shadows. Business traveler, judging by the suit jacket thrown over the chair back. Maybe forty. Safe.

"Something like that," she said.

"Mind if I join you? The pool, I mean. Not—"

"I know what you meant."

He slid into the water with practiced ease. They floated in silence, two strangers in the chlorinated dark.

"My wife used to take vitamins," he said suddenly. "Every morning, like clockwork. Then she stopped. That's how I knew she'd already left, you know? Before she actually told me."

Sarah's chest tightened. "Why are you here?"

"Business. You?"

"Running away. Temporarily."

He laughed softly. "Does it work?"

"The water feels better than the running."

They swam until their fingers wrinkled, until the early morning staff began to arrive. As Sarah climbed out, dripping and strangely light, she realized she hadn't thought about Mark once in two hours.

The vitamin waited on the counter back in her room. She flushed it down the toilet, watched it disappear, and finally slept.