Break Point

The clock on the wall read 2:14 AM. Elena's iPhone glowed on the nightstand, the fifth notification in twenty minutes. Marcus rolled away, his back forming the familiar crescent against the dark. Another sleepless night in a marriage that had become a performance.

"You're like a zombie," his sister had told him over lunch yesterday. "Just walking through it."

He hadn't denied it. Three years of fertility treatments. Two miscarriages. The quiet erosion of intimacy until they were roommates who shared a bed and a mortgage. Elena had found solace in padel—Saturday mornings with her club, Sunday afternoon matches, the thwack of the ball against the racket echoing what she couldn't say.

Marcus reached for the phone. He shouldn't. But he did.

The notifications were from a number he didn't recognize. Not spam. The messages were brief fragments: *Can't stop thinking about today. The way you laughed.* *Elena, this isn't nothing.*

His stomach hollowed out. He scrolled. Weeks of messages, innocent enough on their own, but the pattern was unmistakable. The warmth she showed him in photographs she'd once shown Marcus.

Padel. Of course. The club. Someone she met there.

The bedroom door creaked open. Elena stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the hallway light. She couldn't see the phone in his hand, but she knew. Some instinct, some shift in the room's atmosphere.

"Marcus?" she whispered. "What are you doing awake?"

He considered pretending. Returning the phone. Rolling back toward the wall and letting this cancer grow in silence. That's what a zombie would do.

Instead, he sat up. The phone's screen illuminated both their faces.

"I think," he said, his voice raspy with disuse, "we need to talk."

She didn't come closer. She didn't run. She just stood there, and in that moment, Marcus realized something terrifying and liberating: the worst had already happened, and he was still here. The zombie was waking up.

"Yes," she said softly. "I suppose we do."