What We Carry in the Aquarium

The banquet room hummed with the careful laughter of people who had already decided what they were worth. Elena moved through it like she'd been born here, her hand light on my back—possessive, or reassuring? I couldn't tell anymore.

"You're brooding," she whispered against my ear. "It's just a dinner party."

"I know what it is."

Her boss, Marcus, was holding court near the bar, telling a story about the bull market that had made them all rich or at least richer than they'd been yesterday. His hands moved in sharp, practiced gestures. I'd seen that same confidence in the way Elena looked at me lately, or didn't look at me—like I was an investment that had stopped yielding returns.

"Your husband's quiet," Marcus said, suddenly standing beside us. His smile had teeth. "What do you do?"

"I write," I said. "Mostly technical manuals now."

"Boring stuff?"

"Someone has to explain how things work."

Elena's fingers tightened on my arm. We both remembered the weekend we'd spent watching her sister's goldfish, how she'd cried when it died despite claiming fish were barely sentient. How she'd looked at me then, like I was someone she could be soft with. That was three years ago, before the promotion, before the nights she came home smelling of expensive cologne she claimed was a client's.

Outside, the summer air was thick with things unsaid. I found myself near the hotel's tiny indoor garden, where a massive bear of a man—security, maybe—stood watching a group play baseball on the screen above the bar. They were losing.

"Your team?" he asked.

"No team," I said. "Just watching."

"Baseball's just waiting for something to happen," he said. "Most of it's standing around."

Elena appeared in the doorway, her silhouette sharp against the light. She didn't speak, just waited. The bear of a man glanced between us, then walked away.

"We should go," she said, and for the first time in months, I heard something like fear in her voice. Or maybe it was just the echo of mine.

I followed her back into the room where everyone was laughing, where Marcus was still talking about markets and momentum, where somewhere in the distance, I could hear the low, steady thrum of everything we hadn't said yet, waiting like a pitch nobody wanted to swing at.