The Art of Not Watching

The lightning cracked first, a white fissure across the dusk sky, before the thunder had its say. Elena didn't flinch. She stood at the baseline of the padel court, her skirt swishing, racquet raised, eyes locked on the ball arcing toward her.

I sat beneath the palm fronds, my piña colada sweating onto the lacquered table, watching them. Not the players—her and Mark, the senior partner from the London office—but watching myself watching them. I'd become a spy in my own marriage, collecting evidence I didn't want, cataloging moments that burned like acid in my throat.

Mark was exactly what you'd expect someone called 'the bull' to be—massive shoulders, aggressive serve, a man who charged through life assuming everything would scramble out of his way. He'd been 'bullish' on the merger, 'bullish' on the expansion, 'bullish' on Elena—though he hadn't used that last adjective where I could hear. Not directly.

'You're missing it,' said the bartender, a woman with eyes like flint. 'She's winning.'

'I know.' I drained my glass. 'She always does.'

Another lightning strike, closer now. The palm trees shivered, their fronds illuminated like skeletal fingers against the dark. Elena laughed at something Mark said, head tilted back, throat exposed. I'd been working late for months, building our future, while she'd been building something else entirely.

The bull charged the net. Elena's return clipped the line, perfect and ruthless. She raised one hand to high-five him, and I saw it—that fraction of a second too long, that thumb pressing against his wrist, that terrible intimacy of familiar touch.

I stood up, leaving a hundred-euro tip on the counter. Some things, you pay to witness. Some things, you pay to unsee. The storm broke as I walked away, rain warm as tears, and I realized: I wasn't the only one who'd been playing a game all along.