What We Bear in Deep Water

The pool was empty at 5 AM—just the way I liked it. Swimming laps had become my meditation, the only time I could stop carrying the weight of her name. Fox. Even now, three years later, the word tasted like copper.

I'd just finished my twentieth lap when I saw her sitting on the bench at the pool's edge, legs crossed, watching me with that familiar smirk. Same Fox who'd been my maid of honor, my business partner, my best friend. Same Fox who'd slept with my husband and then emailed me the photos.

I stopped swimming, tread water in the center of the pool. "What are you doing here?"

"Your mother gave me your new address. Said you might need a friend."

I laughed, the sound ugly and watery. "You're not my friend. You're a fox in the henhouse of my life."

She didn't flinch. "I was going to tell you. Before you found out the way you did."

"But you didn't."

"No." She looked away. "Some things are harder to bear than others. The truth, for one. Losing you, for another."

I swam to the edge, pulled myself up, dripping wet. The air was cold against my skin. "You destroyed my marriage. My business. Everything."

"I know." She met my eyes then, and I saw it—the same devastation I'd been living with. "I've been swimming in my own guilt ever since. Turns out, the water's just as cold on this side."

I stood there, shivering, realizing for the first time that we were both drowning. Maybe that was the tragedy—not that she'd betrayed me, but that we'd both lost the only person who'd truly known us.

"Get in," I said.

"What?"

"The pool. Get in. We'll bear it together."

She hesitated, then slipped into the water beside me. We tread water in silence as the sun began to rise, two survivors learning to swim in the wreckage of what we'd been.