What We Drown In

The storm had been battering the coast for three days when Elena showed up at my door, soaking wet and holding that miserable calico cat like a shield. I hadn't seen her in seven years—not since she slept with my husband and then told me she was doing me a favor, that he'd been unhappy for years anyway.

"Please," she said, water dripping from her chin onto my porch. "I have nowhere else to go."

I stepped aside. Some things you don't get to choose, like the weather, or which people forever own pieces of you.

She stayed for a week. The cat, whose name was ironically Mercy, spent most of it hiding under my bed, emerging only to eat or stare at me with judgment in those yellow eyes. Elena and I fell into an strange rhythm, two women circling each other's grief like wounded animals, careful not to show our soft parts.

"Why now?" I asked her on the fourth night, while we sat on my deck watching the rain blur the ocean into grey nothing. The power had gone out hours ago.

Elena took a sip of her whiskey. "He left me. Last month. Just... packed a bag and walked out while I was at work. No note, no nothing." She laughed, sharp and bitter. "Guess I should have seen it coming."

I didn't say what I was thinking—that sometimes the universe balances its accounts in ways that feel like justice but leave no one whole.

"You were my best friend," I said instead, and the words tasted like old blood in my mouth. "I loved you more than him, I think. That's the part that still kills me."

The cat wound between our legs, purring like a small engine. Some creatures don't care about human betrayal—they only care about who fills the bowl, who offers warmth, who remains.

"I know," Elena whispered. "I've thought about it every day for seven years. Some things you don't get to forgive yourself for."

We sat in silence as the water kept falling, washing over everything, indifferent to our small human tragedies. And in that moment, I understood something about grief: it doesn't resolve. It just becomes another room you learn to live inside, another flood you learn to tread water in, waiting for whatever comes next.

"Stay as long as you need," I said, surprising myself. "But Mercy sleeps in the other room."

Elena nodded, and the cat purred louder, and the rain kept falling on all of us, the guilty and the spared, with exactly the same indifference.