Expiry Date

Marcus woke at 5:43, as he had every morning for six months and eleven days. The alarm didn't sound anymore—his body had learned the rhythm of abandonment.

On the nightstand, the vitamin sorter Elena had gifted him for his forty-fifth birthday still sat, each compartment labeled in her neat handwriting: Morning, Afternoon, Evening. He'd stopped taking them weeks ago, but he still opened the little plastic doors, still checked them as if monitoring the vital signs of a marriage on life support.

Then he was running, pounding the canal path in the predawn gray, his breath sharp in his lungs, legs pumping with the futile desperation of someone trying to outrace their own shadow. Four miles. Always four miles—the distance from their front door to the hospital where her mother had died, the place where he'd first seen the hollowed-out version of the woman he'd married. She'd never been the same after. Neither had they.

At 7:30 AM, he arrived at Club de Padel, still paying for the couples' membership even though he played alone now, rotating through partners who never asked why he'd never renew his contract. The court became his confessional, the glass walls enclosing a space where he could sweat out the words he'd never said to her: I should have seen it. I should have stopped you from leaving.

"Marcus." The manager, Javier, approached him near the entrance. "Your membership—it expires end of month. We need to know if you'll renew as single or..."

Or what? Cancel. Let it go.

The vitamins in the medicine cabinet at home expired in seventeen days. The same day as the membership. Elena had timed it like that, always organized, always three steps ahead. She'd known before he did.

A woman across the court waved at him—Sarah, his regular partner lately, forty-something with knowing eyes and a backhand like a whip. She'd never asked about the empty side of his locker.

"Next Tuesday?" she called.

Marcus looked at his hands, the tan line where his wedding ring had been. He'd stopped wearing it three weeks ago. Small rebellions.

"No," he said, the word foreign and sharp in his mouth. "No more Tuesdays."

He walked out past the courts where he'd first met Elena across the net, where she'd laughed at his terrible serve and accepted his drink anyway, where everything had seemed possible. The running path stretched ahead, four miles back to an empty house where expired vitamins waited in their plastic compartments.

He didn't run this time. He walked.