The Scorekeeper

The fluorescent lights hummed above the padel court, casting everything in a sickly blue-white glow. Sarah watched Marcus across the net, his shirt already damp with sweat, his movements slightly slower than she remembered. Ten years will do that.

"You're still holding the racquet wrong," she called out, returning his serve with a sharp crack against the glass wall. "Too tight. You're going to hurt your shoulder."

Marcus laughed, that same easy laugh that had drawn her in during their freshman year. "Some things don't change."

But everything had changed. That was the problem with being friends first, lovers second, and now... whatever they were. Strangers who knew each other's middle names and childhood fears.

They played in silence for a while, the rhythm of the game filling the space where conversation used to live. Sarah's mind drifted to that summer after college, when they'd driven cross-country in his broken-down Honda, stopping at minor league baseball games in small towns whose names she'd forgotten. They'd sat on hard aluminum bleachers, drinking warm beer, making up stories about the players. Marcus had claimed the third baseman was running from a gambling debt in Oklahoma. Sarah had invented a torrid affair between the pitcher and a local waitress.

She'd loved him then. Not loved him, but *loved* him, in that terrifying all-consuming way that only makes sense when you're twenty-three and the world feels both enormous and entirely yours.

"Your serve," Marcus said now, breaking her reverie.

Sarah missed the ball entirely. It bounced twice near her feet.

"You okay?" He asked, genuine concern in his voice.

"Fine. Just tired."

They sat on the bench between games, drinking from water bottles. Sarah noticed the gray at his temples, the fine lines around his eyes when he smiled. She wondered if he saw the same in her—whether he looked at her face and saw the girl who'd once climbed onto a baseball dugument at midnight in Akron, Ohio, to scream that she was going to marry him someday.

She hadn't, obviously. She'd married David, an accountant who didn't like sports and always remembered to put the toilet seat down. Marcus had married someone else too—a yoga instructor named Chloe. They were both happy, probably. Successful, definitely.

"Remember that road trip?" Marcus asked suddenly, as if reading her thoughts.

"Which one?"

He smiled, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "The baseball one. You made me buy that ridiculous cap."

Sarah felt something tighten in her chest. "I still have it."

"Yeah?"

"In a box somewhere. With the ticket stubs."

Marcus nodded, looking down at his hands. "Chloe and I are separating."

The words hung between them like the ball at the top of its arc—that moment when anything might still happen, before gravity makes its claim.

"I'm sorry," Sarah said, and meant it.

"She wants different things. I want... I don't know what I want. Not this, though."

He looked up, and for a second, Sarah saw it again—that possibility they'd walked away from so easily, assuming there would always be time, assuming the important choices were still ahead of them. But now she was thirty-five, and sometimes the road not taken was just a road you didn't take.

"One more game?" Marcus asked, standing up.

Sarah looked at him—at the friend who'd been almost everything, the almost who'd become a memory, the memory standing before her asking for one more game. She thought about David at home, probably asleep by now. She thought about the box in her closet with the baseball cap and ticket stubs and a life she'd almost lived.

"You're on," she said, picking up her racquet.

They played until the facility turned off the lights, two friends in the dark, hitting a ball back and forth long after they'd stopped keeping score.