The Morning After

Elena moved out last Tuesday, taking the dog but leaving the padel racket she'd bought me for my birthday. It hung there on the wall of the garage, gathering dust next to the boxes I hadn't bothered to unpack from our move to the suburbs three years ago.

I stood in my boxers at 6 AM, staring at my phone. The portfolio was down 14%—the bull market everyone had been banking on had decided to gore us all. My boss had sent a Slack message at 11 PM last night, something about restructuring and keeping our heads down. I knew what that meant.

The dog, a golden retriever named Buster who loved Elena more than he'd ever loved me, would be better off. She'd taken him to her sister's place in the country. Probably running through fields somewhere, not staring at a wall in a three-bedroom house we couldn't really afford anymore.

I poured coffee that tasted like regret and walked out to the garage. The padel racket seemed to mock me. We used to play every Sunday morning at that club near the coast, back when we still had things to talk about that weren't mortgages, careers, or why we weren't happy.

My phone buzzed. Another work notification.

"You got a minute?" it read from Sarah, the junior analyst who'd been giving me those looks at happy hours lately.

I should delete it. I should pack up this house, sell it while the market was still sort of kind of not totally dead. I should call my mother.

Instead I sat on the concrete floor and gripped the padel racket, remembering how Elena's laugh used to echo across the court when I'd miss an easy shot. The grief hit me then—not in a wave, but in the way everything quietly collapses when you finally stop holding it up.

The bull market was dead. The marriage was over. The dog was gone.

I typed back: "Coffee?"

Sometimes you don't choose the next terrible thing. Sometimes it just arrives, and you let it in.