Service Fault

The padel court at sunset was empty except for them. Elena hadn't wanted to come to Cabo for their anniversary, but Marcus had insisted on this resort, with its palm trees and infinity pools and forced leisure.

"Your turn to serve," she said, though he wasn't holding the racket.

Marcus's iphone lay on the bench between them, face down. Its charging cable snaked across the concrete like a dead thing. He kept checking it, even during their match.

"It's work," he'd said earlier, when she'd caught him texting during breakfast. "The merger's falling apart."

"It's always something." She'd bitten her lip, tasted the margarita salt still lingering from last night's argument.

Now he reached for the phone again. His palm was sweating—nerves, or the humidity, or the fact that they hadn't really spoken since they'd landed three days ago. He swiped the screen, squinted at whatever crisis demanded his attention.

Elena watched him. Seven years together, and she still couldn't read him. She'd stopped trying to.

"Marcus."

"Just one second."

"That's what you said during our anniversary dinner." Her voice cracked. "That's what you said when I told you about my mother's diagnosis. That's what you say every time I need you to actually be here."

He looked up then. The phone's screen illuminated his face, casting his features in that familiar blue glow. Behind him, the sun dipped below the palm trees, painting the sky in bruising purples and reds.

"Elena—"

"Do you even remember what we were fighting about last night?"

He opened his mouth, closed it. The cable lay between them, a technological tether he couldn't sever.

"I didn't think so."

She walked to the bench, picked up her own phone—screen intact, unlike his cracked one—and slipped it into her pocket. The match point had been reached long ago. They'd just both been too cowardly to call the score.

"I'm going for a walk," she said, and meant: I'm leaving.

Marcus's palm hovered over his device, indecisive. The cable anchored him to the bench, to his work, to a life that didn't include room for her grief, her fears, the way she needed him to simply put down the fucking phone and hold her.

"Elena, wait—"

But she was already walking past the palm trees, toward the ocean, toward whatever came next. The padel court remained empty, the game unfinished, as it had been for years.