The Last Serve

The heat radiating off the padel court was nothing compared to the fire in Elena's chest. She adjusted her hat, pulling the brim low to hide eyes that had spent too much of the last forty-eight hours staring at her ceiling, plotting and second-guessing.

Across the net, Mark laughed at something Sarah said. Sarah — her best friend since freshman year, her maid of honor, the woman currently sleeping with Elena's husband. The confirmation had come at 2 AM via a blurred photo sent from an anonymous burner number, but the metadata in the corner had been unmistakable: Mark's iPhone, Sarah's bedroom, the date stamp from the night Elena had been at her mother's funeral.

"You coming?" Mark called, bouncing the ball against the surface.

Elena stepped onto the court. The routine of it was almost comforting — the familiar grip of the racket, the hollow sound of the ball, the back-and-forth that had always been their Sunday thing. The four of them, every week, until three weeks ago when Mark and Sarah had started showing up with flimsy excuses about overtime and migraines.

She served. The ball clipped the net and dribbled over.

"Lucky," Sarah said, but her smile didn't reach her eyes.

They played in silence. Elena's body moved through motions etched into muscle memory while her mind replayed every conversation from the past year, every canceled dinner, every unexplained absence. She thought about the iPhone she'd found in Mark's gym bag last week, the new one he'd claimed was a work upgrade, locked with a passcode he refused to share. The same phone that had pinged Sarah's location at 11 PM on Tuesday.

"Game point," Mark said, grinning like he used to when they'd first started dating, before mortgages and infertility treatments had carved trenches between them.

Elena caught the toss. She looked at Sarah, really looked at her — the friend who had held her through three miscarriages, who knew Elena's passwords and her deepest fears, who had apparently decided that none of it mattered anymore.

She served directly into Sarah's chest. Hard.

Sarah gasped, stumbling back.

"Sorry," Elena said. "My hand slipped."

But they both knew it wasn't an apology. It was a beginning.