The Last Goodbye at Padel

Elena adjusted the brim of her father's panama **hat**, the sweatband still bearing the faint scent of his pomade. Three months after the funeral, and she was still wearing his things to work, to dinner, to bed. Her therapist called it 'prolonged attachment disorder.' Elena called it surviving.

The **lightning** had been crackling across the Madrid skyline for hours, a distant electrical storm that mirrored the static in her chest. She sat on the bench at the padel club, watching Carlos warm up with his new girlfriend—a twenty-something named Sofia who moved with the effortless grace Elena had lost somewhere between mortgage payments and fertility treatments.

She felt like a **zombie** these days, moving through her life on automatic pilot. Wake, work, sleep, repeat. The passion she and Carlos had shared during those first glorious years had decayed into something gray and unrecognizable. He'd accused her of being emotionally absent, of disappearing into herself. He wasn't wrong.

'Te amo, Elena.' Carlos's voice broke through her thoughts. He stood at the **padel** court's edge, sweat dripping from his forehead, Sofia's hand possessively on his arm. 'I never stopped loving you. I just couldn't reach you anymore.'

The first fat raindrop splattered against the artificial turf. Another followed. Then the sky opened.

Elena stood up, her father's hat shielding her face. 'I know,' she said, her voice steady for the first time in months. 'I couldn't reach me either.'

She walked toward them, each step deliberate. Not toward Carlos, but toward the exit. Behind her, thunder finally broke—a sound like the world tearing open.

Somewhere in the distance, lightning struck, and Elena didn't look back.