The Last Game

Marcus stood at the baseline of the padel court, his racquet loose in his grip. They'd met here, six years ago. Elena had been playing with someone else, and she'd wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and smiled, and that had been it. His whole life rearranged around that smile.

Now she stood across the net, absorbed in her iphone, scrolling through something that made her frown.

"Your mother called," Elena said, still not looking up. "She sent a card about Buster. That was kind."

Kind. The bar had fallen so low he couldn't see it anymore. They'd put the dog down two weeks ago, and their house had felt too big ever since.

The wind picked up. Beyond the court's glass walls, something moved in the tree line—a bear, probably. One of the black bears that wandered down from the mountains sometimes, looking for food or maybe just looking. He'd seen one the morning after his father's funeral, shambling through the backyard, and he'd thought: *That's me. Just walking through places I don't belong.*

"We should go," Elena said, pocketing her phone. "Before the rain starts."

"Go where?"

"Home, Marcus. To our home."

Across the adjacent court, a kid threw a baseball against the fence. *Thwack. Thwack.* Rhythmic, relentless. Marcus remembered throwing a baseball with his father in the yard, the smell of cut grass, his father saying *good arm* once—the only praise he'd ever gotten. The baseball had felt heavy in his hand, loaded with expectation. Now the kid threw it again, and it echoed like something trying to knock itself down.

He looked at Elena, really looked at her, and saw that she was waiting for him to say something—anything—that would make the last six years make sense again. But the words weren't there. They'd never really been there.

"Yeah," he said. "Home."

The first drops hit the glass as they walked to the car, side by side, not touching. The bear in the woods watched them go. The kid kept throwing the baseball. *Thwack. Thwack.*