The Last Padel Match

I didn't want to be here. The court lights buzzed with that same fluorescent hum that had followed me through three decades of cubicles, conference rooms, and now this—early retirement at forty-two, packaged out when the cable division collapsed.

"You're standing like a zombie," Marcus called from the other side of the net, grinning. He'd always been handsome in that careless way, the kind of man who aged like expensive leather while the rest of us dried out and cracked.

He was right. My feet felt planted in cement, the padel racket heavy as a corpse in my hand. We'd been friends since business school, since before the startup IPO that minted him and left me with options worth less than the paper they were printed on.

"You sold out early," I said, hitting the ball back. It sailed wide. "Should've held."

"Should've, would've." Marcus returned it effortlessly, a perfect arc that landed just inside the line. "Unlike some people, I didn't have a sentimental attachment to a dying industry. Cable, Elena? Really? You stayed for the pension."

The ball struck me in the chest—hard enough to leave a mark, soft enough that I knew he'd pulled the swing. I'd suspected for months that he'd known about the acquisition talks. Had warned his own portfolio companies to divest while encouraging me to double down on cable infrastructure investments.

"I trusted you," I said simply.

Marcus stopped playing. The silence between us was heavier than the humidity, thicker than all the years between who we were and who we'd become. He walked to the net, resting his hands on the tape.

"You want the truth?" His voice cracked. "I was trying to protect you. If you'd sold when I did, you'd have reinvested in crypto. Or NFTs. You'd have lost everything instead of just most of it."

I stared at him—at the gray threading his temples, the way his shoulders slunched, the exhaustion behind his eyes. Marcus wasn't the enemy. Time was. The industry was. The way everything moved faster than we could adapt, leaving us zombie-like, going through motions we'd outgrown.

"One more game," I said, picking up the ball. "But I'm serving."