What We Lose in the Water

The divorce papers sat on the kitchen counter beside a wilting bag of spinach that Mara had forgotten to refrigerate. Three days now, and still she couldn't bring herself to cook it, couldn't bring herself to sign.

'Do you remember,' Daniel asked from the doorway, 'that summer we went swimming in the lake at your mother's house?'

Mara didn't turn around. 'The water was freezing.'

'You made me take that vitamin D supplement first. Said it was ironic, swimming to get sun while swallowing sun in pill form.' His voice had that careful quality, like he was speaking across a canyon.

She pressed her palms against the cold granite. 'That was five years ago, Daniel.'

'I saw a fox this morning,' he said. 'In the backyard. Just standing there, watching me drink coffee. It looked so wild, so completely uninterested in whether I existed or not.' He paused. 'I think that's what I want. To be that unattached to things.'

Mara finally turned. Daniel had lost weight. His clothes hung differently. 'So you're leaving because a fox made you feel too attached?' The bitterness surprised her, sharp as lightning across a dark sky.

'No. I'm leaving because I don't know how to be married to someone who looks right through me.' He stepped closer. 'You haven't looked at me — really looked at me — in months.'

'That's not true.' But it was. She knew it was.

'Do it now,' he said. 'Look at me.'

She forced herself to meet his eyes, and there it was: the exhaustion, the patience worn thin, the precise geometry of how they'd fit together once and didn't anymore. Outside, thunder cracked. Rain began to hammer the roof.

'The spinach,' she said suddenly. 'It's going to go bad.'

Daniel smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. 'Some things already have.'

He walked out into the storm. Mara watched through the window as his car pulled away, headlights cutting through the downpour. In the yard, where Daniel had seen the fox, something moved in the darkness — quick, precise, gone before she could be certain it had been there at all. She picked up the pen. Her hand didn't shake at all.