The Score We Settle

The padel ball hit the wall with a hollow thud, bouncing back toward me at an angle I couldn't read. Across the court, David's shirt was already dark with sweat at the armpits and collar. He'd been surprising aggressive today, his serve harder than usual, his returns sharper. We were supposed to be celebrating our fifteenth anniversary at this resort in Marbella, but the air between us felt like the space between stars—vast, cold, and filled with things we couldn't say.

'Your backhand's off,' David called out, retrieving another ball from his pocket. 'You're not following through.'

I thought of the way he'd stopped following through on everything lately. Promises to call his mother. The basement renovation project. The conversation about children we'd been postponing since year eight of our marriage. Always something more urgent at work, always another quarter to close, always another bonus to chase. Now I was thirty-eight, and the silence in our London flat had grown louder than our conversations.

We'd finally bought the dog last year—a golden retriever named Barnaby who'd shredded three pairs of designer shoes before we'd even finished paying for him. David wanted to return him. I'd refused. Barnaby was sleeping on a memory foam bed in our flat right now, probably dreaming, probably loving us in that uncomplicated way dogs do, while we stood on opposite sides of a blue court in Spain, pretending everything was fine.

I remembered my first pet, a goldfish won at a fair when I was seven. It had lived three days in a bowl on my nightstand before my mother found it floating. She'd flushed it while I was at school and replaced it with an identical one from the pet store. I'd known instantly—it was the wrong shade of orange, the fins too perfect—but I'd pretended to believe her lie. That's what you did when you were seven, and that's what I'd been doing for fifteen years of marriage. Pretending to believe the replacement was the same as the original.

David served again. The ball sailed long, bouncing past the baseline. 'Fault,' I said automatically.

He shook his head, walking to the net. 'Sarah, we need to talk.'

The words hung between us like the ball suspended at the apex of its arc. I could hear distant laughter from the pool, the clink of glasses at the clubhouse bar, the hum of cicadas in the heat. Everything continued. The world didn't pause for heartbreak.

'Talk,' I said, gripping my racket until my knuckles whitened.

'This isn't working.' His voice cracked. 'I think you know that.'

I thought about Barnaby waiting at home, about how we'd promised him walks we never took. I thought about all the goldfish we'd been flushing for years—all the versions of ourselves we'd pretended still existed. The score was fifteen-love, and I hadn't even realized we were playing for keeps.

'Play out the set,' I heard myself say. 'Then we can talk.'

David nodded slowly. He understood. Some things you can't say across a net. You have to finish the game first, even when you already know you've lost everything that mattered.