The Last Match Point

I've been running from the truth for six months. That's how long it's been since I slept in my own bed, since I looked Mark in the eye and pretended everything was fine. The guest room in my brother's condo has become my sanctuary, its silence preferable to the quiet hatred that settled over our marriage like radiation poisoning.

We met at the padel court every Tuesday, Elena and I. It was her idea - something new, something we could learn together. Padel, she explained, was like tennis but smaller, quicker, more intimate. The glass walls surrounded us, creating a transparent cage where our failures echoed. I'd watch her swing, her movements precise and joyless, counting the unforced errors like tally marks on a prison wall.

"You're not even trying anymore," she said after one particularly disastrous match. We'd lost to a couple in their seventies. "You're just going through the motions."

"I'm tired, El. That's all."

"You're always tired. You're always working late. You're always somewhere else."

The cable guy came on a Thursday. I'd taken the day off, supposedly for a dentist appointment. He found me sitting in the garage, surrounded by boxes I hadn't bothered to unpack since our move three years ago. Elena wanted premium channels, sports packages, anything to fill the silences between us.

"Cable's been disconnected since last month," I told him. "She doesn't know yet. I keep paying the bill, but I had them shut it off."

He looked at me like I was confessing to murder. Maybe I was. Killing something that used to be alive.

That evening, I met David for drinks. He'd been my friend since college, since before Elena, since before the baseball scholarship I'd turned down to follow her to graduate school. David didn't know about the separation. Nobody did. We were still "working on things," still going to couples therapy, still pretending that love was something that could be repaired like a faulty transmission.

"You used to be so alive," David said, watching me nurse my third whiskey. "Remember road trips? Remember sneaking into that Cubs game? Remember when you actually gave a shit about something?"

"I give a shit about plenty of things."

"Name one. Besides not being alone."

I couldn't.

The divorce papers came in the mail two weeks later. I signed them at the kitchen table while Elena was at her padel league, my hand shaking so hard I had to do it twice. Then I packed what remained of my things, called my brother, and finally, finally stopped running.

The game ended when I left. Padel, baseball, marriage - all of it required at least two people who believed there was still something worth winning.