Exit Interview

Marcus sat in his parked car outside the padel club, watching through the chain-link fence as his ex-wife Eleanor moved across the court. She played with that same aggressive grace she'd brought to their marriage — every swing precise, every movement calculated. Three years ago, he'd called her a ball-buster, but the truth was simpler: she'd just been stronger than him.

Their son sat in the stands, a baseball glove resting on his knee, studiously ignoring his mother. At fifteen, Jake had chosen sides with the silent cunning of a fox — sensing which parent was less likely to disappoint him, then burrowing in for safety. Marcus had lost that competition months ago, somewhere between missed weekends and the confession that he'd been fired from the firm.

He thought about the day it ended — not the divorce, but the career. Twenty years of being the bull on Wall Street, charging through deals with his head down, convinced momentum was the same thing as mastery. The partners had called him a dinosaur in the meeting. They used nicer words, but he'd heard them anyway: inflexible, old-fashioned, done.

"You never learned when to stop charging," Eleanor had told him when she moved out. "Some fights aren't worth the victory."

A pounding on his window made him jump. Jake stood there in his baseball uniform, glaring. Marcus rolled down the window.

"She sees you," Jake said. "If you're going to stalk her, at least have the balls to come inside."

The cruelty was precise. His son had inherited Eleanor's surgical instinct for weakness.

Marcus watched Eleanor laugh at something her partner said — a handsome man half her age, moving with easy confidence. She'd rebuilt herself while he was still trying to understand what he'd lost. The inventory of his failures stretched out before him: a career built on force that became obsolete, a marriage where love had curdled into competition, a son who'd learned to protect himself by shutting his father out.

He started the car. Some exits, he decided, you don't get to interview for. You just leave.