Service Fault

The padel court echoed with that familiar hollow smack—ball against glass, reverberating through the Saturday morning emptiness. Elena adjusted her grip on the racket, watching David across the net. His graying hair caught the morning light, silver strands he'd stopped bothering to hide three years ago.

'You're distracted,' he said, not quite a question.

She'd been thinking about their dog, Buster, buried last month beneath the oak tree. How the house felt too large now, how she'd started leaving the radio on to fill the silence. 'Just tired. The merger's eating everything.'

David's serve clipped the net. The ball dribbled over. A charity point. He didn't smile.

They'd met playing baseball in college—she the shortstop with the rocket arm, he the pitcher who couldn't quite stop watching her from the mound. That version of themselves felt like someone else's memory now, filed away with the photos of their twenties, before the promotions and the mortgage and the slow erosion of whatever had once felt urgent between them.

'There's something I need to tell you.' His voice was flat.

Elena's stomach dropped. Here it was—the other woman, the secret gambling problem, the mid-life crisis she'd been dreading since she turned forty.

'I took the job in Singapore.' He picked up another ball from his pocket. 'They want me there by June.'

She laughed, the sound sharp and foreign in the cavernous space. 'We're discussing our marriage across a padel net? Seriously?'

'You've been gone for months, El. Even when you're home.' He gestured vaguely with his racket. 'I thought maybe if I—'

'You thought what? That you'd just decide for both of us?' Her chest tightened. 'Like the goldfish you won me at that fair? Remember? You decided it needed a "better environment" and gave it to your sister without asking. I cried for three days over that stupid fish.'

David stared. 'That was fifteen years ago.'

'And you still don't get it.' She dropped her racket. It clattered against the court floor. 'I'm not asking you to stay. I'm asking you to see me.'

The silence stretched, filled only by distant traffic and the hum of the arena lights. Somewhere, a dog barked—maybe in the parking lot, maybe in another life.

'See you how?' he finally asked, his voice cracking.

Elena walked to the net, reaching for his hand across it. Their fingers brushed—tentative, electric, terrifying.

'As someone who might actually want to come with you,' she whispered. 'If you asked properly.'

David's grip tightened. For the first time in months, neither of them looked away.