The Dead Don't Play Padel

Marcus checked his phone again. The same three texts from Elena, each increasingly desperate, each unanswered. He'd become something else these past months—a zombie moving through the remnants of his life, appetite gone, sleep fragmented into two-hour intervals he spent staring at the ceiling while his wife pretended to breathe evenly beside him.

"You coming?" called Brad from the padel court. His business partner, his best friend, the man who'd introduced Marcus to Elena at that wedding four years ago. "We need a fourth."

Marcus stepped onto the blue court, the glass walls framing him in a cage of sunlight. He hadn't played since the incident six weeks ago, since he'd discovered the tracking app on his phone. Since he'd learned his wife had been reporting his movements to her father's security firm for three years. A spy in his own bed.

His racquet felt foreign in his hand. The ball cracked against the wall, rebounding at angles he used to anticipate instinctively. Now he was slow, rusty, watching himself play from somewhere far away.

"You look like shit," Brad said later at the net, sweating and grinning. "Elena worried?"

Marcus laughed, a dry sound that scraped his throat. "Elena's fine."

"She told me you're sleeping in the guest room."

The words landed like a blow. Of course she'd told him. They all talked. The whole circle of friends who'd been at that wedding, who'd toasted their future, who'd watched them become this.

"She says you're distant," Brad continued, oblivious. "Like you're not really there anymore."

Marcus stared at his friend, really seeing him for the first time. Brad's casual smile, his easy assumption that everything could be solved over drinks. How much did he know? How much had Elena told him about the tracking, about the late-night "security briefings" with her father, about Marcus's increasingly frequent "business trips" that were actually just driving until dawn?

"I'm working on it," Marcus said.

"Good." Brad clapped his shoulder. "Same time next week?"

"Maybe."

That night, Marcus lay in the guest room's narrow bed and listened to Elena move through the house. Footboards creaking, water running, the soft sounds of a life that had somehow become someone else's. He reached for his phone, opened the tracking app she'd forgotten to deactivate, and watched the blue dot that was him pulse alone in the darkness.

Tomorrow he'd delete it. Tomorrow he'd pack a bag. But tonight, he just watched himself breathe on the screen, feeling for the first time in months like something that might, eventually, learn to be alive again.