The Empty Side of the Bed

David stood by the edge of the infinity **pool**, nursing a scotch that had gone warm an hour ago. The water reflected something violent and **orange**—sunset, or maybe just the neon sign from the resort bar behind him. He couldn't tell anymore.

She was on court three, playing **padel** with him.

The man was twenty-five, possibly younger. David couldn't remember, didn't care to know. He watched the way Sarah moved—lighter than she'd moved in years, her laugh carrying across the empty courts like something fragile and breakable. She hadn't laughed like that in their house. Not since before the miscarriage, before the silence grew thick enough to choke on.

Their daughter lay on a lounge chair nearby, headphones on, scrolling through her phone. Twelve years old and already learning that parents were just people who disappointed you in increasingly creative ways.

"Your wife's quite good," a woman's voice said beside him.

David turned. A stranger—maybe fifty, expensive watch, a martini in hand. "She used to play competitively."

"Used to?"

"Life happened."

The woman nodded, like this was a language she understood. "My husband and I come here every year. We pretend it's for the tennis, but really it's because we can't figure out how to talk to each other anywhere else."

David watched Sarah dive for a shot, miss, and come up laughing. The younger man offered his hand to help her up. She took it. She held on a second too long.

"We had a fight before we left," David found himself saying. "About something stupid. **Baseball** tickets. I wanted to take our daughter to a game. Sarah said I was trying to turn her into someone she wasn't."

"And were you?"

"I was trying. To be a father. To be something she could look at without that look in her eyes—the one that says I'm a stranger she married by accident."

The evening was settling now, the orange light bleeding into purple. Other couples were emerging from their rooms, hand in hand, ready for dinner. Rituals. The things that held marriages together when nothing else would.

Sarah and the younger man were packing up their gear. David's daughter had pulled off her headphones and was watching them, her face unreadable.

"The thing about affairs," the woman beside him said quietly, "is that everyone thinks they're about passion. But really they're about grief. About mourning something that died while you were still sleeping beside it."

David finished his drink. The ice had melted completely.

Sarah spotted him and froze. For a moment, she looked terrified. Then something shifted—her shoulders dropped, her face settled into something like relief. She said something to the younger man. He nodded once and walked away.

Sarah crossed the grass toward David, not hurrying, not slowing. She stopped when she reached him, close enough that he could smell her sweat and the court's clay dust and the expensive perfume she'd bought for this trip.

"I'm sorry," she said. "About the baseball tickets. About everything."

"I know," David said.

"What happens now?"

He looked at their daughter, who was watching them with the same cautious hope she used to have on Christmas morning. He looked at Sarah, really seeing her for the first time in years—not as the woman who'd failed him, but as the one he'd failed right back.

"Now we figure out," he said, "if there's anything left worth saving."

Behind them, the pool lights flickered on, turning the water something impossible and blue. The evening was just beginning.