Dog Paddling

Mia wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, the grip of her padel racquet still humming with the vibration of her last shot. Across the net, Marcus bent to retrieve the ball, his shoulders moving in that familiar rhythm she once found reassuring—before everything between them became a performance.

"Your backhand's getting better," he called, straightening up. The compliment landed like a dead fish between them.

"Thanks." She didn't mean it. Nothing she said to him anymore meant anything at all.

They'd come to this coastal resort on what Marcus called a "marital reset." Five days of padel lessons, spa treatments, and compulsory intimacy. Mia had spent most of the trip thinking about the dog back home—Buster, waiting at her sister's house, probably confused why his humans had abandoned him. At least Buster's love had never been negotiable. At least he'd never looked at her with that mixture of disappointment and calculation she saw in Marcus's eyes daily.

"You want to hit the pool after this?" Marcus asked, walking to the net. "Cool off?"

The water beckoned from beyond the court's glass walls—turquoise and merciless. Mia imagined sinking beneath its surface, the silence, the weightlessness. How easy it would be to simply drift away from all the conversations they kept having, circular and fruitless as a dog chasing its tail.

"Actually," she said, surprising herself, "I think I'll walk down to the beach instead."

Marcus's face tightened. "We have dinner plans at seven."

"I know. I'll be back."

She left him there among the racquets and the polite applause of neighboring courts, walking past the pool toward the ocean. The water darkened as she approached, shifting from inviting turquoise to something ancient and indifferent. She stood at the edge where the sand turned to foam and thought about how she'd spent three years trying to be the person Marcus wanted, performing love like a sport she'd never signed up to play.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket—a photo from her sister. Buster asleep on the couch, muzzle resting on his paws, trusting and complete in his dog-heartedness. Something in her chest cracked open.

The water lapped at her ankles, cold and absolute. Not a reset, she realized. A revelation. She turned back toward the resort, toward Marcus and the final match of their marriage, already calculating how to tell him. This time, she wouldn't need a racquet to say what she meant.