Summer of Solitaire

The divorce papers were signed, sealed, and sitting on her kitchen counter when Elena received the text from Marco: *Padel at 6?*

He called himself her friend, though they'd been sleeping together since his wife left him. Their arrangement had the delicious simplicity of an affair without betrayal—two bruised people using each other as tourniquets.

She arrived at the club wearing the orange dress he'd once called garish. The color felt defiant now, a flag planted in the wasteland of her new life.

"You're wearing the dress," Marco said, his face doing something complicated.

"I am." She adjusted her racquet. "Ready to lose?"

The game was vicious. Their bodies moved with practiced violence across the court—lunging, swinging, their breath syncing in ways that felt intimate and terrible. Padel was supposed to be friendly, sociable. They played like they were trying to hurt each other.

Afterward, they stood by the pool in the deepening twilight. The water reflected the club's floodlights—black glass scattered with broken stars. Someone's birthday party was winding down. Balloons, wilted and tethered, drifted across the surface.

"My brother's getting remarried," Marco said suddenly. "Third time. He says this one's different."

Elena watched an orange balloon escape its moorings and drift toward the far end of the pool. "They always say that."

"Do you think we could've made it work?" Marco asked quietly. "If we'd actually tried, instead of—"

"Instead of using each other to avoid being alone?" She turned to face him. "Marco, we're not in love. We're just two people who forgot how to be by ourselves."

"That's not nothing," he said.

"No," she agreed. "But it's not enough."

A child ran past them, chasing a wayward beach ball, followed by a harried mother calling someone's name. The air smelled of chlorine and cut grass and expensive perfume.

"What now, then?" Marco asked.

Elena thought of the signed papers on her counter. The empty closet space where David's suits used to hang. The way her own reflection sometimes felt like a stranger's.

"Now I learn to be alone," she said. "Really alone. Not with someone filling the silence."

Marco nodded. He understood this was a different kind of ending—not the dramatic slamming of doors or weeping in rain, but the quiet recognition that some things don't get to become other things.

"I'll still see you around," he said.

"I know." She touched his arm briefly, a final concession. "That's the problem."

She walked away without looking back, leaving him by the pool with its floating balloons and broken-star reflections, wearing her defiant orange dress like a promise she intended to keep.