The Orange Sunset at Padel

She found him at the padel court again, smashing the ball against the glass wall as if trying to break through to something else. The thwack of the racquet echoed in the empty complex at dusk, each hit more desperate than the last. Elena watched from the shadows, her hands clutching the vitamin supplements the doctor had prescribed — the ones that were supposed to fix what couldn't be fixed.

"You're missing it," David said without turning around. He knew she was there. He always knew.

"Missing what?" she asked, though she already knew the answer.

"The orange light," he said, finally stopping. He gestured at the sunset bleeding across the court's glass walls. "It only lasts for five minutes. We've been married for seven years, and I never noticed until now."

Elena's throat tightened. They'd stopped running — literally and figuratively — after the third miscarriage. No more morning jogs together, no more fleeing their problems with motion and sweat. Just stillness and supplements and appointments with specialists who offered sympathy but no solutions.

"The sphinx at the museum," she said suddenly, the memory surfacing unbidden. "We saw it on our first date. You said it was smiling because it knew the answer to a question we hadn't asked yet."

David turned then, his expression ancient. "I was wrong. It wasn't smiling. It was screaming."

He crossed the court, limping slightly — an old running injury that had never healed properly. "I've been thinking about leaving, Elena. Not you. Just — everything. The job, the city, this endless cycle of trying and failing. Maybe somewhere else, the odds would be different."

"Or maybe we'd just be miserable somewhere else," she countered, her voice sharp with the bitterness they'd both been swallowing for months.

"True." He reached for her hand, his palm sticky with sweat. "But at least we'd be running toward something instead of away from everything."

Elena looked at the vitamin bottle in her other hand, then at the deepening orange light that would soon be gone. She poured the capsules onto the court, watching them scatter like spilled secrets. The glass sphinx on the wall seemed to watch, its silent judgment finally clear.

"Then let's go," she said. "Before the light runs out."

And for the first time in a year, they both started moving.