The Padel Court at 8 PM

The court lights buzzed overhead, that electric hum that always gave Elena a headache. Martin stood across the net, his padel racquet raised, shirt already stained with sweat. Forty years old and still insisting they needed this—weekly matches, scheduled like board meetings, squeezed between deadline panic and the hollow ache of parenting a teenager who'd stopped speaking to them.

"Your serve," Martin called, but he wasn't looking at her. He was watching his own reflection in the darkened glass that lined the court. Checking his hair.

Elena felt something crack open in her chest. Six months ago, Martin had started shaving his head. His hair had been thinning for years, another casualty of the startup grind, but the sudden shave had felt like surrender. Like he was giving up on the version of himself who still cared how he looked. Who still cared about anything.

"Martin."

He blinked, focused on her. "What?"

"You're a zombie." The words fell out before she could stop them. Not an accusation. Just recognition.

He lowered the racquet. His face—that familiar face she'd woken up beside for seventeen years—showed nothing. No surprise. No hurt. Just that smooth, professional blankness he used in performance reviews with direct reports who were about to be laid off. That corporate numbness had leaked into everything.

"I know," he said.

The silence between them stretched, heavy with all the things they'd stopped saying years ago. Elena looked at her husband—the corporate zombie, the stranger in their marriage bed—and felt grief so sharp it nearly dropped her to her knees.

"Do you remember why we started playing?" she asked.

He actually thought about it. "Exercise?"

"We wanted to be people who did things. Who lived. Not just worked and slept and died a little every day."

Martin set down his racquet. He walked to the net, leaned his forehead against the metal. When he looked up, his eyes were wet. "I don't know how to stop, El. The zombie thing." His voice cracked. "I think it ate us."

Elena crossed the court, touched his bare head. His skin was warm, the stubble soft under her palm. This was real. Whatever else they'd lost, this moment still belonged to them.

"We can figure it out," she said. "But first—you're holding the racquet wrong." She smiled, a small, fragile thing. "Let's play like we mean it."