Service Error

The sweat on my palm made the padel racket slip—just like David had slipped away three months ago. I stood on the court at 7 AM, watching Marco's back as he served. He didn't know about the messages. None of them did.

"You're playing like shit today," Marco called out, grinning that easy grin of his. The same grin David used to give me from across our shared office desk before everything went wrong.

I forced a laugh. "Rough night."

That was putting it mildly. At 2 AM, my iphone had lit up with another notification from David. Just a meme. Nothing that justified waking me up, nothing that justified the way I'd stared at the ceiling until dawn, cycling through everything I'd lost—not just him, but the promotion he'd taken credit for, the friends who'd chosen sides, the version of myself who believed that being agreeable was the same as being good.

After the game, I sat in my car and dry-swallowed a vitamin D supplement my doctor had prescribed for "seasonal affective disorder," which was medical code for your life has become a gray blur of work and sleep and avoidance. The pill caught in my throat.

When I got home, Barnaby—my sister's cat, whom I was watching while she traveled—wound between my legs, purring like a small, furry engine of judgment. He settled on my lap as I opened my laptop to work from home, avoiding the office entirely.

The iphone buzzed again. David: *Saw you left early. Everything okay?*

I stared at the message until the screen went dark. Barnaby's paw batted at my hand. Outside, palm fronds caught the wind against my window—same view David and I had picked out together, back when we were picking out everything.

The vitamin D finally dissolved, bitter on my tongue. I deleted the message without replying. Then I blocked his number.

Barnaby kneaded my thigh, claws pressing in and out. It hurt, but I let him. Some pain, I decided, was simply the price of staying somewhere long enough to heal.