The Cable Snapped

Her hair was the first thing to go. Not the gray—that came later—but the thickness, the way it used to fall across her shoulders when she laughed. That was three years ago, before the promotion, before the nights when I'd find her sitting in the dark, staring at nothing. Now it's pulled back severe, efficient. Like her.

I watch from the balcony as she plays padel with her coworkers on the court below. She moves with precision, calculating, every swing deliberate. Dave from accounting is her partner. His laugh carries up to me. He's good at padel. He's good at a lot of things I'm not.

Inside, my father's baseball glove sits on the mantle, gathering dust alongside the urn we couldn't bring ourselves to fill. Dad taught me to catch with that glove. "Soft hands," he'd say. "You can't hold anything if you're gripping too tight." I grip everything too tight these days.

The cable guy was supposed to come between noon and four. It's six. No show. Not that it matters—we haven't watched anything together since she stopped coming to bed at the same time as me. The cable's been dead for weeks, just static and silence and the realization that we'd been watching different screens on different couches for years anyway.

She comes up from the court, breathless, flushed in a way I haven't seen in our bedroom in months. "Dave thinks we should come to dinner," she says, wringing sweat from her hair. "His wife makes this incredible risotto."

I think about the glove. About soft hands. About the cable that snapped somewhere between us, invisible and vital, carrying nothing anymore.

"Sure," I say. "Why not."

She smiles—not the smile that used to crinkle her eyes, but the polite one she saves for clients. The one that means we'll both pretend nothing's wrong while we eat risotto and make small talk about padel strategies and office politics and everything that matters less than the things we've stopped saying.

I pick up my father's glove. The leather's stiff now, unused. But I remember how it felt to catch something worth keeping.

"Your hair looks nice," I tell her.

She pauses, hand halfway to the bathroom door. For a second, something flickers behind her eyes. Then it's gone.

"Thanks," she says, and closes the door.