Breathing Underwater

The divorce papers sat on the kitchen counter beside his daily vitamin regimen — organized, precise, a hypocrisy that made him want to laugh. Thirty years of marriage reduced to notarized documents and a B-complex complex.

'Meet me at the padel court,' Elena had texted that morning. 'One last game.'

The absurdity of it. They hadn't played in fifteen years, not since before the miscarriage that hollowed her out, not since he learned to stop asking what she needed and started silently placing spinach salads in front of her instead. As if leafy greens could fill the space where their daughter should have been.

Now she wanted to play padel.

The court was empty when he arrived. Elena was already there, stretching in that way she had — deliberate, almost reverent. She looked different. Lighter.

'I'm selling the house,' she said without greeting. 'I'm moving to the coast.'

He nodded. He couldn't speak.

'You should come. Sometimes I think — ' She stopped, her racket hand trembling slightly. 'Remember when we went swimming that night in Greece? When we thought we'd drown and realized we didn't want to be saved?'

He remembered. They'd been so young then, so certain that love was something you could hold underwater, something that wouldn't dissolve in the salt.

'I've been taking swimming lessons,' she said quietly. 'I realized I forgot how. Somewhere along the way, I forgot how to keep myself afloat.'

The ball hit the padel wall with a hollow thud that echoed his own hollowness. He wanted to tell her that vitamins couldn't fix this, that spinach couldn't make you strong enough to carry someone else's grief forever. That some things you simply had to let sink.

Instead, he picked up his racket.

'Serve,' he said.

She did. And for the first time in years, neither of them kept score.