Insufficient Funds

The protein shake tasted like chalk and ambition.

Elena Vance stood at the kitchen island — twelve feet of Italian Carrara marble she’d picked out from a catalog Richard had pre-approved — and forced herself to swallow. Vanilla. Collagen peptides. Ashwagandha, which sounded like a sneeze and supposedly reduced cortisol, though nothing reduced cortisol like not living in a house where every surface could double as an operating table.

She rinsed the blender. Dried it. Placed it back on the counter at the exact forty-five-degree angle Richard preferred, the cord tucked behind the backsplash so the kitchen maintained its “clean sight lines.” His words. The kitchen designer had nodded like he’d said something profound.

Seven-fourteen a.m. Richard had left at six-thirty — gym, then the office, then whatever it was that men who managed other people’s money did between the hours of nine and seven. Elena had kissed his cheek at the door. He’d smelled like Acqua di Gio and authority.

“Pilates at nine,” he’d said, not a question. “And the Hendersons are coming for dinner Saturday, so call Marguerite about the menu.”

“Of course.”

“You look tired, sweetheart.”

She didn’t look tired. She looked exactly the way she always looked — pressed, polished, expensive. But Richard said you look tired the way other men said I love you: reflexively, without examining whether it was true.

The house exhaled around her. Four thousand square feet of exhale. Beige walls, beige carpet, beige existence. The white noise machine in the hallway hummed its antiseptic lullaby, smoothing every silence into something flatter.

She had forty-five minutes before Pilates. Forty-five minutes of her own. She could read. She could sit in the garden. She could scream into the decorative throw pillows and no one would hear because the nearest neighbor was two acres of manicured lawn away.

Instead, she picked up her keys.

She didn’t know why. She didn’t know why she drove past the Starbucks — the one with the oat milk and the soft jazz and the other Elenas waiting in line in their Lululemon. She didn’t know why she kept driving, down the hill, past the gates, into the part of town where the coffee shops had hand-painted signs and the parking meters actually worked because people here counted quarters.

The Grind sat on a corner between a laundromat and a tattoo parlor. It looked like it had been designed by someone who’d heard of aesthetics but decided against them. The sign was spray-painted. The windows were fogged with steam. A sticker on the door read NO WI-FI. TALK TO EACH OTHER, YOU COWARDS.

Elena parked her white Lexus between a dented Honda and a motorcycle that looked like it had been built from spite and salvage parts. She checked her reflection in the rearview — blonde bob, fresh blowout, the silk blouse she’d bought at Nordstrom last Tuesday because buying things was what she did on Tuesdays — and thought, briefly, that she looked like a woman visiting an exhibit at the zoo.

She went in anyway.

…