The Last Cable

The padel court smelled of rubber and desperation. Elena hadn't played since before the miscarriage, seven months ago, but here she was, racket in hand, watching her husband Marcos laugh with his assistant Sofia from the sidelines. The glass walls distorted them like funhouse mirrors.

"Your turn," Marcos called, not bothering to look at her. The ball sailed toward her, a bright yellow sphere she couldn't bring herself to hit.

"I forgot my running shoes," she said instead, setting down the racket. The excuse was flimsy — they were in her bag — but Marcos only shrugged, already turning back to Sofia. Something about a quarterly report, something about cables and fiber optics and the merger that would finally make them partners instead of employees.

Later, packing her things, Elena found the old ethernet cable she'd used to Marcos's laptop last week. He'd asked her to troubleshoot his connection, paranoid about corporate espionage. Instead, she'd found the messages: not Sofia, but Sofia's husband. Not an affair, but something worse — Marcos had been leaking their startup's proprietary code to a competitor. The cable in her hand felt suddenly heavy, a snake coiled around her conscience.

She'd been running from this truth for weeks, the same way she'd been running from her grief, from the empty nursery they'd finally stopped pretending to finish. The padel game had been Marcos's idea: "We need to do normal things again, Elena. Be us."

They could never be them again.

The CEO's number was still in her phone from last year's holiday party. Elena dialled, the cable still wrapped around her fingers like a lifeline. Or a noose.

"Marcos isn't who you think he is," she said when he answered. "I have the data. I have everything."

Outside, the running trail wound through the corporate park where they'd first met. Elena stood at the window, watching a solitary jogger pace against the sunset. She'd start running tomorrow — literally, at first, until her lungs burned and her legs gave out. Then she'd run toward whatever came next, alone and finally free.