The Last Goodbye

Maria stared at the orange sunset through her apartment window, the light bleeding onto the floor where Barnaby—the cat David had insisted they needed, then left behind when he walked out three months ago—curled into a perfect comma of indifference. She swallowed her evening vitamin with practiced ritual, the pill clicking against her teeth like a tiny punctuation mark marking the end of another day without him.

The padel court had been her sister's idea. "You need to get out there, Maria. Meet people. Move your body." So here she was, Friday evenings, smacking a ball against a glass wall while strangers pretended not to notice her desperate enthusiasm. She was terrible at it, always in the wrong place, always swinging too late or too early, her movements jerky and unpracticed.

"You're overthinking it," said Daniel, the regular who played with maddening grace. He was maybe forty, with tired eyes and a wedding ring that had left a pale strip of skin around his finger. "Just feel it."

She felt something, certainly. The thud of ball against racket traveled up her arm like a heartbeat. The sweat gathering at her hairline. The strange electric awareness of Daniel standing too close during changeovers, the way his shoulder brushed hers when they switched sides.

Afterward, they sat on the bench outside, breathing hard. Maria fumbled with her phone, the charging cable tangled around her fingers like a liar's knot. She'd stopped charging it at night—the empty side of the bed still too raw, still too much.

"My wife left," Daniel said suddenly, not looking at her. "Six months ago."

Maria's breath caught. "David left me. Three months."

He nodded. They sat in silence as the parking lot lights flickered on, moths circling in confused devotion. Barnaby would be waiting, would weave between her ankles demanding dinner, would judge her silence with inscrutable gold eyes. The vitamins would continue their futile work. The padel would continue its inadequate metaphor.

"You want to get dinner?" Daniel asked. "Nothing weird. Just—two people who shouldn't be alone tonight."

Maria looked at him, really looked, and saw the same careful architecture of holding-it-together that she'd been building all wrong. "Yes," she said, and the word was a surprise in her mouth, "yes."