What We Keep in the Water

The resort pool was empty at 3 AM, its surface still except for the lone goldfish spiraling in the shallow end—probably escaped from the decorative pond near the lobby. Elena sat on the edge, legs submerged, nursing her third gin and tonic.

"You're going to freeze," Marcus said, dropping his room key on the patio table. He'd been gone two hours.

"I'm fine."

He stripped to his boxers and slid in beside her. The water lapped against his chest. "I didn't sleep with her."

"The fox in the hen house routine. You keep saying that."

"It's the truth. We talked. About us. About—the options."

Elena laughed, sharp and tired. "Options? Since when is what we did for five years some kind of multiple choice problem?"

They'd come here to fix things. Or maybe to finally break them properly. Three rounds of IVF, three failures, and somewhere along the way they'd become people who slept in separate rooms and loved each other with the desperate precision of bomb defusal experts.

Marcus reached for her hand under the water. His palm was warm against her cold fingers. "She said sometimes you have to stop trying to force something that's not going to take."

"And did you tell her we spent eighty thousand dollars learning that lesson?"

"I told her about the last time. When you—"

"When I what? When I held the bear your mother gave us for the nursery and couldn't stop screaming for an hour? That time?"

The goldfish flashed silver in the moonlight, oblivious.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For tonight. For all of it."

"Sorry doesn't fix what's broken, Marcus."

"No," he said quietly. "But it's a start."

She looked at him then—at the lines around his eyes, at the man she'd married at twenty-six who'd somehow become someone she didn't quite recognize anymore. The water pooled around them both.

"Stay here with me," she said. "Just—until the sun comes up. Don't go back to the room. Don't make any decisions tonight."

Marcus nodded, settling back against the pool's edge. They watched the goldfish make its endless circles, both pretending they didn't know what came next.