A reset.
Ten days without work emails, alarms, traffic, dishes, responsibilities, or excuses.
Just us.
The first day actually felt promising.
We landed exhausted but excited.
The air was warm and salty when we stepped outside the airport.
Claire squeezed my hand in the shuttle.
"This already feels better."
I believed her.
We arrived at the resort around sunset.
Our room was nicer than the photos.
Large bed.
White tile floors.
Sliding glass doors.
Balcony facing the ocean.
Claire walked directly outside and stood at the railing.
I came up behind her, wrapped my arms around her waist, and kissed the side of her neck.
"We needed this," I said.
She leaned back against me.
"Yeah."
The first night we ate seafood at a restaurant near the beach.
We drank too much wine.
We laughed.
For the first time in months, she wasn't checking her phone every five minutes.
I remember lying in bed thinking maybe we'd been right.
Maybe nothing was fundamentally broken.
Maybe we were just tired.
The second day started well too.
Breakfast.
Beach.
Swimming.
Lunch by the pool.
That afternoon, I went back to the room because the travel exhaustion finally caught up with me.
Claire said she wanted to stay downstairs.
"You sure?"
She held up her cocktail.
"I have nowhere else to be."
I kissed her and went upstairs.
I slept for almost three hours.
When I woke, Claire wasn't in the room.
I showered.
Changed.
Eventually she returned.
She seemed unusually energetic.
"Good nap?" she asked.
"Apparently I died for three hours."
She laughed.
"I met some people by the pool."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. Just tourists."
I didn't think anything of it.
That sentence would replay in my head later.
Just tourists.
We went to dinner.
Claire seemed distracted.
Not unhappy.
If anything, she seemed more alive than usual.
I mistook that energy for proof the vacation was working.
The next morning, she spent more time getting ready than she had the day before.
She changed swimsuits twice.
I joked about it.
"Are we being photographed today?"
She rolled her eyes.
"Can I look nice on vacation?"
"Apparently not without formal permission."
She smiled, but there was something in her expression I couldn't read.
We went downstairs together.
At some point she said she wanted another drink.
I stayed on the beach reading.
She was gone almost forty minutes.
When she returned, I asked what took so long.
"The bar was busy."
That was the first lie I recognized only afterward.
Day three was when everything fell apart.
We had spent most of the afternoon at the beach.
Nothing terrible happened.
That's what I remember most clearly.
There was no argument before it.
No warning.
We came back to the room sandy and tired.
Claire showered first.
I opened a beer from the minibar and went onto the balcony.
The sun was beginning to drop toward the water.
Everything was gold.
The ocean looked almost fake.
Below us, people were moving between the pool and restaurants.
Music drifted upward.
Someone was laughing.
I remember thinking it was exactly the evening we'd paid thousands of dollars to experience.
Then the sliding door opened behind me.
Claire came outside.
She had changed into shorts and a white blouse.
Her hair was still damp.
She sat in the chair across from me instead of beside me.
That was the first thing I noticed.
The second was her face.
Cold isn't exactly the right word.
Resolved might be better.
She looked like someone who'd had an argument privately and already decided who won.