Green Between Us

The padel court echoed with the hollow thwack of ball against racquet—a sound that used to mean Sunday mornings with Marcus, before the affair, before the divorce papers, before I started showing up here alone at dawn hoping to catch him playing against someone new.

Today he was here. With her.

She was tall and athletic and wore a headband that matched her skirt, and she moved across the court like she'd been born holding a racquet. I stood near the fence, hidden by shadow, watching them laugh between points. Marcus hadn't laughed like that with me in years. Maybe ever.

"You're running again," my sister had said during our last phone call. "You ran from the marriage, now you're running from the grief. You need to stop running."

I wasn't running. I was regrouping.

My phone buzzed. A reminder: Pick up CSA share. Spinach, kale, radishes. Before Marcus, I'd survived on takeout and frozen meals. Cooking for him had become my love language—elaborate, time-consuming dishes that I'd researched and practiced. Spinach salad with warm bacon dressing. Creamed spinach with garlic. Spanakopita from scratch.

The first week after he moved out, I'd made a massive pot of spinach soup and eaten it for every meal until I'd made myself sick.

Now I stood watching them play, my fingers curled around the chain-link fence, and I realized I hadn't cooked anything real in months. I was back to takeout, back to running, back to all the habits I'd sworn I'd left behind when I met him.

Marcus looked up then and saw me. His racquet lowered. The woman turned too.

"Rachel," he said, starting toward the fence. "I didn't know you were—"

"I'm not," I said, cutting him off. "I was just leaving."

But I didn't move. I stood there as he approached, as the woman watched from the baseline, as something vast and unreadable passed between us. I saw spinach stuck between his front teeth—a remnant of breakfast, maybe, or a smoothie—and something in my chest cracked open.

I reached through the fence and brushed it away with my thumb. He flinched but didn't pull back.

"You've got spinach," I said softly.

His eyes found mine. "Rachel—"

"No." I stepped back, my hand falling to my side. "I'm done running from things I want. And I'm done running toward things that don't want me back."

I turned and walked away as the padel court echoed behind me, thwack and thwack and thwack, like a heartbeat finding its rhythm again.