Tethered to the Net

The orange ball thudded against the padel court, each echo marking time like a metronome counting down the final minutes of something I couldn't name. Marcus stood across the net, sweat dripping down his temple, his grin too wide for the scoreline.

"You're thinking about her again," he said, returning my serve with effortless precision. "I can see it in your shoulders."

We'd been friends for fifteen years, since the startup days when sleep was optional and ambition was oxygen. Now he was VP of something at a company that had betrayed everything we'd built, and I was clutching a resignation letter in my locker like a weapon I wasn't ready to use.

"I'm not," I lied.

"Bullshit." Marcus smashed the ball into the corner. "You haven't been yourself since the restructuring. Since Sarah—"

"Don't."

"She chose him, man. The cable's been cut. Move on."

The cable. That's what he'd called it—the invisible thread that had tethered me to Sarah for three years, through promotions and failures and nights when we'd coded until dawn on her living room floor. But Marcus saw it as something to sever, while I'd spent months trying to understand how it had frayed so silently, so completely, while I wasn't looking.

I walked to the net, my breath ragged. The orange sky burned through the skylight—sunset colors bleeding into dusk, that particular shade of orange that makes everything feel like it's ending or beginning, depending on how you look at it.

"I'm leaving," I said.

Marcus dropped his racquet. "The company?"

"Everything. The city. The life where my best friend fucks my girlfriend and calls it 'restructuring.'"

He flinched. The silence between us grew heavier than the humidity.

"I didn't know you knew," he whispered.

"The cable she was plugged into wasn't yours either, Marcus. It was mine."

I walked off the court, leaving him standing there in the orange light, both of us finally untethered.