The Fourth Set

Elena served, the ball ricocheting off the glass wall of the padel court at precisely the wrong angle. It was her third error in as many minutes. Marcus, across the net, didn't even try to return it.

"You're distracted," he said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "Again."

"I'm fine."

"You haven't been fine since Tuesday. Since you found the transmitter." His voice dropped. "Since you realized your husband's been a spy for fifteen years."

The word still tasted wrong. Spy. Like something from movies, not from their life together. Not from David, who made terrible coffee and forgot anniversaries and had once, in a moment of drunken vulnerability at a company picnic, compared corporate espionage to baseball — it's all about waiting for the right pitch, he'd said, then swinging before anyone sees it coming.

She'd laughed. She'd thought he was using a metaphor.

"I keep wondering," Elena said, bouncing the ball against her racket strings, "if any of it was real. The trips to Tuscany. The time he held me while I cried after my mother died. The way he makes spinach lasagna on Sundays because he knows it's my favorite."

"Does it matter?" Marcus hit a perfect serve into the corner. She didn't move. "The feelings were real. You felt them. He felt them. That's not something you fake."

"But everything else was." She walked to the net. "He was assigned to me, Marcus. My father's company. That's why we met. That's why he married me. It was an operation."

"Or," Marcus said gently, "it started that way and then became something else. People surprise themselves. Even spies."

The club's other courts were empty. Through the glass walls, she could see the city skyline looming gray and indifferent. Somewhere out there, David was probably finishing whatever spies did on Thursday afternoons. Maybe he was reporting to handlers. Maybe he was buying spinach for Sunday. Maybe both.

"What are you going to do?" Marcus asked.

Elena squeezed the racket handle until her knuckles whitened. "I'm going to finish this match. Then I'm going home. And when David walks through the door with that lasagna, I'm going to ask him something I should have asked years ago."

"What?"

"If he had to do it all again — the mission, the marriage, everything — would he still choose me?" She stepped back to the baseline. "Your serve."

Marcus tossed the ball up. "And if the answer is yes?"

"Then I suppose," Elena said, watching the ball arc toward her, "we figure out how to play the fourth set together."