Service Fault

Marcus stood at the baseline of padel court three, his racquet dangling like a dead limb. The fluorescent lights hummed against the warehouse ceiling, casting everything in clinical white. Across the net, Elena stretched against the glass wall, her silhouette familiar and devastating.

"You're going to hit it or just stare at it?" she called, not unkindly. They'd been here before—literally, every Thursday for three years, and metaphorically, in that exhausted space where love had curdled into habit.

He served. The ball ricocheted off the back wall, a predictable trajectory. Elena returned it lazily. They were playing dead, moving through motions they'd memorized when they still meant something.

"You're a zombie," she'd told him two months ago, when he came home at 2 AM yet again, smelling of whiskey and junior associate desperation. "You died somewhere between the office and the front door, and your body just keeps walking."

She wasn't wrong. The corporate law grinder had hollowed him out, left him functioning on autopilot—billing hours, filing motions, sleeping beside her like a piece of furniture that had forgotten its purpose.

The rally continued, pointlessly competitive. Marcus remembered watching his father play baseball in the park, how the old man would toss him underhand pitches even when Marcus had begged for fastballs. Some kindnesses are just postponements of the truth.

"Water break," Elena said, though they'd only played ten minutes. She pulled a bottle from her bag, condensation weeping down the plastic. "I talked to Chen about the separation agreement."

Marcus's racquet slipped from his hand. The sound echoed like a gunshot in the enclosed space.

"Already?" His voice cracked.

"I can't be married to a ghost, Marcus." She drank, her throat working. "And you can't keep haunting our apartment."

He looked at his hands—same hands that had held hers at their wedding, same hands that now filed briefs and signed divorce papers. Outside, rain began to drum against the corrugated metal roof, relentless as water eroding stone.

"I wanted to be better," he said.

"I know." She set down the bottle. "That's why it took me so long to leave."

The buzzer sounded—their court time, up. Neither moved to retrieve the ball. Some games end long before the final point.