The Last Good Morning

His alarm went off at 5:45 AM. Same as every morning for fifteen years.

Daniel lay there, staring at the ceiling, feeling like a zombie moving through someone else's life. His wife had left eight months ago. His division at work was "being realigned" — corporate for we're firing half of you next week. And today was the mandatory team-building retreat at the padel club.

Perfect.

The locker room smelled of expensive cologne and quiet desperation. Daniel tied his shoes while the guy from accounting talked about his mounting credit card debt. Someone's kid had screamed through a 3 AM client call. Everyone was exhausted, pretending otherwise, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

They'd paired him with Marcus from IT — twenty-three, optimistic, the kind of person who still believed effort correlated with outcome. Daniel's body remembered the motions: swing, step, pivot. His hands knew what his heart had forgotten how to feel.

"You're really good," Marcus said after Daniel's fifth clean winner.

"I used to play," Daniel said. "Before." Before the cable bills and the mortgage and the refinance. Before he'd stopped swimming laps at the YMCA because he was always "too busy." Before he'd become the person who watched life happen to other people.

They were walking toward the courts when Daniel's phone buzzed. His boss, wanting a "quick sync" before their 10 AM with the VP.

The VP — the bull everyone was afraid of, the one who'd survived four rounds of layoffs by being louder than everyone else. Daniel had spent three years taking it, nodding in meetings, swallowing objections, waiting for stability that never came.

Something in Daniel cracked.

"I need to make a call," he told Marcus, and walked toward the parking lot instead of the courts.

He dialed his ex-wife.

"Daniel?"

"I don't know what I'm doing," he said, and it was the first honest thing he'd said in months. "I think I've been dead since you left. And I don't know how to come back."

Silence on the line. Then: "Come over. We can talk. Not about us — about you."

Daniel hung up and texted his boss: "Family emergency. Taking the day."

Then he deleted the work email from his phone.

He drove toward the coast with the windows down. Toward Sarah. Toward whatever came next.

The zombie inside him had finally stopped walking.