Sea Glass

“People think they fight over the house or the custody schedule, but they don’t. They fight over who wins the history of the war.”

Kathy Murphy spoke these words to herself, a private mantra before every mediation. She sat at the head of her conference table, its mahogany surface polished to a mirror finish that reflected the overhead lights like pools of oil. The soundproofing in these walls had cost her a year’s profit. Worth every penny to contain the venom that leaked from failing marriages.

Across from her, David and Sarah Hartley occupied opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. David’s jaw worked constantly, grinding teeth that would need crowns before he turned forty. Sarah sat rigid, her posture so perfect it looked painful, fingers locked around a leather portfolio she hadn’t opened once in three sessions.

Between them sat the last item on their inventory sheet: a Mason jar filled with sea glass.

“Twelve million in assets divided,” Kathy said, consulting her tablet. “The Westchester property to Sarah. The Manhattan condo to David. Investment portfolios split per the prenuptial agreement. All that remains is item 247.”

Sarah’s fingers tightened on her portfolio. “That stays with me.”

“Like hell.” David’s fist hit the table. The jar jumped.

Kathy had mediated over three hundred divorces. She’d seen couples wage war over taxidermied pets, frozen embryos, and burial plots. Money was language; possessions were pronouns. But this jar. This worthless collection of smoothed glass. It radiated something different.

“The monetary value is negligible,” Kathy said. “Perhaps we could…”

“Don’t.” Sarah’s interruption came sharp. “Don’t you dare suggest we sell it.”

David leaned forward. “She doesn’t even want it. She just doesn’t want me to have it.”

“You forfeited your right to it when you…”

“When I what? When I tried to save us?”

The familiar crescendo began. Kathy had witnessed this symphony before: accusation, defense, escalation, explosion. But when she suggested disposal, both of them moved. Not toward each other, but toward the jar. Their hands stopped inches from the glass, a moment of synchronized protection that lasted barely a second.

Then they retreated to their corners, breathing hard.

Kathy recalibrated. Twenty years of reading micro-expressions told her this wasn’t spite. Their eyes kept returning to the jar like moths to flame, then jerking away as if burned. This was something else. Something that lived in the space between love and hate, where grief made its nest.

“We need to determine the true value of this item,” Kathy said. She stood, her heels clicking against the floor with metronomic precision. “Not monetary. Personal.”

She lifted the jar. The glass inside shifted, a sound like broken bells.

“You will inventory it,” she said. “Every piece. Together.”

The crash of glass on mahogany rang through the room like a gunshot. Hundreds of pieces scattered across the table’s surface: frosted greens, clouded whites, browns like old medicine bottles, blues that held the memory of deeper water.

Sarah flinched. David’s hands jerked toward the spill, then pulled back.

“Count them,” Kathy commanded. “Alternating. David, you begin.”

He stared at her, then at the glass. His fingers hovered over a piece of green, worn smooth as skin. He picked it up. “One.”

Sarah selected a triangle of white. Her voice came out rusty. “Two.”

“Three.” A brown shard.

“Four.” Blue, almost purple at the edges.

The rhythm established itself. The only sounds were the soft scrape of glass on wood and their voices, growing quieter with each number. Kathy watched their faces change. The rigid masks of anger began to crack, revealing something raw underneath.

By piece twenty, David’s breathing had gone shallow. By thirty, Sarah’s perfect posture had collapsed. The counting continued, but something else was happening. Each piece they touched seemed to pull something from them, like glass conducting electricity in reverse.

“Forty-one,” David whispered, holding a piece of amber glass up to the light.

“Forty-two,” Sarah responded, her fingers closing around a frosted blue circle.

Their eyes met across the table. Not in anger this time. In recognition of something shared and terrible.

“This one,” David said, breaking protocol, touching a piece of green shaped like a teardrop. “This was from that morning when you…”

“Stop,” Sarah said, but her voice held no force.

“When you couldn’t get out of bed. I walked the beach alone for three hours. Found this by the pier.”

Sarah’s hand found a white piece, edges sharp enough to cut. “The day we decided to drive home. I couldn’t look at the ocean anymore.”

Kathy remained silent, watching the story unspool between them like thread from a worn sweater.

The pieces accumulated between them, a constellation of broken things. David picked up a shard of bottle green, turned it over in his palm like a worry stone.

“June seventeenth,” he said. “Two years ago.”

Sarah’s intake of breath was sharp enough to cut. “Don’t.”

“They need to know. She needs to know.” He looked at Kathy, eyes red-rimmed. “We lost our son. Six months along. They called it a cord accident. Such a clinical word for it. Accident.”

The room’s temperature seemed to drop. Kathy kept her expression neutral, but something shifted in her chest. A tightness she recognized from her own buried losses.

Sarah picked up another piece, this one clear as water. “The doctor said we should get away. Process. Heal.” She laughed. The sound made David flinch. “So we went to Maine. Off-season. This little town called Salvation Point. Can you believe that name?”

“Nothing there but fog and rocks,” David continued. “We rented a cottage that smelled like mildew. Didn’t speak for the first three days. Just walked. Separate directions down the same beach.”

The glass between them caught the fluorescent light, throwing small rainbows across the mahogany. Each piece a day survived. Each color a moment they’d endured without shattering completely.

“We started collecting these,” Sarah said. “Not together. But we’d pass each other on the beach, pockets full of glass. Like we were both trying to find something smooth in all that sharp.”

David’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “We never talked about what we were doing. Just came back to the cottage each night and added our pieces to this jar we found in the kitchen cabinet.”

“Seventy-three pieces,” Sarah said. “One for each day we stayed. One for each day we didn’t talk about Benjamin.”

The name hung in the air. Their son. The one who never drew breath.

Kathy watched them both reach for the same piece of blue glass, their fingers almost touching before they pulled back. The gesture contained everything: the inability to comfort each other, the shared wound that had become infected with silence, the love that had curdled into something neither could name.

“After we came home, we couldn’t look at it,” David said. “Put it in a closet. Then the garage. Then storage. But throwing it away felt like…”

“Like throwing him away,” Sarah finished. “Like admitting he never existed.”

The counting had stopped. The glass lay between them, no longer sorted, no longer numbered. Just fragments of a grief too large to hold alone, too heavy to share.

Kathy understood now. The jar wasn’t an asset to be divided. It was a memorial to everything they’d lost: their son, certainly, but also the couple who’d believed they could weather any storm together. The jar held the last moment they’d been united, even if that unity was built on walking opposite directions down the same empty beach.

“Neither of you wants to keep it,” Kathy said. It wasn’t a question.

David shook his head. “If I take it, I’m the one who can’t let go.”

“If I take it, I’m the one who won’t move forward,” Sarah added.

They were trapped in an impossible equation. Keep the jar and drown in memory. Release it and lose the only proof their son had almost existed. They needed someone to make the choice they couldn’t.

They needed absolution.

Kathy stood. The movement was deliberate, ceremonial. She walked to the scattered glass, her hands steady as she began gathering the pieces. Not counting now. Just collecting.

“There’s a clause in your arbitration agreement,” she said, then paused, fingers closing around a piece of blue glass. She could feel the lie forming, necessary and clean. “Article seventeen, subsection…” She pretended to search her memory. “Four. When an item causes demonstrable emotional distress that prevents closure, I am authorized to act as custodian.”

Sarah’s eyes widened. “What?”

“The firm maintains a vault for such items.” Kathy continued building the fiction, each word steadier than the last. “They remain in storage until both parties jointly request their return.” She placed the last piece of glass into the jar. The sound it made was almost musical.

“That’s not…” David started, then stopped. Something in Kathy’s face, perhaps. The way she held the jar like it already belonged to her.

“It’s binding,” Kathy said, meeting his eyes directly. The conviction in her voice came from somewhere deeper than law books. “The decision is made.”

She pulled the jar toward herself, cradling it against her suit jacket. The glass shifted inside, whispering secrets she’d never fully understand.

“You can’t just take it,” Sarah protested, but the relief in her voice betrayed her.

“I’m not taking it. I’m holding it. There’s a difference.” Kathy met their eyes in turn. “You’ve been carrying this weight together, but apart. Neither moving forward, neither letting go. I’m offering you a third option.”

David slumped in his chair. Sarah’s perfect posture finally, fully crumbled.

“What if we want it back?” David asked.

“Then you’ll have to want it together,” Kathy said. “Both signatures. Both present.”

The silence stretched between them. Kathy watched realization dawn on their faces. She hadn’t just taken the jar. She’d taken the responsibility for the decision. She’d become the villain so they could stop being victims. The stranger who would hold their grief so they could finally, possibly, heal.

Sarah stood first, gathering her portfolio with shaking hands. David followed, shoving papers into his briefcase without order. They moved toward the door, then stopped.

“Thank you,” Sarah whispered, not looking back.

David nodded once, sharp and quick.

Kathy watched from her window as they emerged onto the street below. The late afternoon sun cut between buildings, dividing the sidewalk into strips of light and shadow. David turned left, toward the subway entrance, his pace quickening with each step. Sarah turned right, toward the parking garage, pulling her coat tight despite the warm air.

They walked in opposite directions, but for the first time in two years, they walked unburdened. The terrible arithmetic of their grief no longer required solving. Someone else held the remainder.

Kathy returned to her empty conference room. The building had gone quiet, other offices closed for the evening. She sat alone at the head of the table, the jar heavy in her hands. Inside, the glass shifted and settled. Seventy-three pieces. Seventy-three days of survival. A child named Benjamin who existed now only in the space between smooth edges and salt-worn surfaces.

She thought of her own losses, the ones she’d buried under professional distance and billable hours. The marriage that had ended not in war but in quiet surrender. The pregnancy she’d terminated at twenty-three, a decision that still visited her in dreams. The mother she’d stopped visiting in the memory care ward, who no longer knew her name.

Kathy opened the bottom drawer of her desk, where she kept the things that didn’t belong anywhere else. A wedding ring she’d never sold. A photograph of a woman who might have been her mother, might have been a stranger. And now, a jar of sea glass that belonged to no one and everyone.

She closed the drawer. Locked it.

Outside, David and Sarah continued walking away from each other, the distance between them growing with each step.

The building’s lights dimmed automatically, sensing no movement. Kathy sat still in the gathering darkness. The jar’s weight pressed against the drawer’s wood, just inches from her knee. She could feel it there, the way she felt the ring and the photograph on the days she tried not to think about them.

Tomorrow there would be another couple. Another war. Another history to divide.

She placed her hand flat against the locked drawer. Inside, seventy-three pieces of glass held their silence. Benjamin Hartley, who had lived for six months beneath his mother’s ribs, existed now only in the space between those smooth edges.

Kathy remained at the table as the building emptied around her. She didn’t move when the security guard made his rounds. She didn’t move when the streetlights came on outside. She sat with her hand on the drawer, keeping watch over things that couldn’t be divided, only held.