Strawberries in December

Elena should have been at the office, parsing through data on the undersea **cable** project, but here she was, sitting in her car outside the Padel Club, watching her husband through the fence. Marcus laughed at something the redhead said—a genuine laugh, head thrown back, the way he used to laugh with her before life accumulated between them like silt.

She'd become a **spy** in her own marriage, three weeks of tailing him, checking phone records, decoding his calendar. The irony wasn't lost on her: she'd spent fifteen years building trust, and now she was dismantling it, piece by piece, with the precision of someone who'd learned to suspect everything.

The padel ball cracked against the court—rhythmic, competitive, intimate. Elena touched her front tooth. The **spinach** from lunch had been lodged there for two hours now; every reflection in every rearview mirror had shown her looking ridiculous, caught between dignity and decay. She should have gone home, cleaned up, prepared herself for the confrontation she'd been rehearsing in the shower. But she stayed.

Marcus's hand grazed the woman's back as they switched sides. Casual, proprietary. The kind of touch that says *I know your body.* Elena's stomach hollowed out.

The dashboard bear bobble-head—a stupid souvenir from their anniversary trip to Montana—swayed with her ragged breathing. **Bear** down, she told herself. You can **bear** this. You've borne worse. But she wasn't sure she had.

The woman laughed again, wiping sweat from her forehead with the hem of her shirt. Elena recognized that movement: unconscious, vulnerable. The way someone moves when they're not being watched, when they believe themselves safe in another person's gaze.

Elena started the engine. The revelation wasn't in the discovery; it was in the relief. The waiting was over. The surveillance, the suspicion, the quiet erosion of her dignity—done. She pulled away from the curb, leaving behind the rhythmic thwack of padel balls and the life she'd thought she had, heading toward the lawyer whose card she'd tucked into her wallet like a secret weapon.