The Service Game

Elena adjusted the brim of her hat, conscious of how the chemotherapy had thinned her hair to baby-fine wisps that caught in the collar of her polo shirt. The padel court gleamed under artificial lights, its glass walls reflecting a version of herself she barely recognized — leaner, fragile, yet somehow more resolved.

Across the net, Mark stretched his calves. He looked good. The bastard always looked good. Three years of marriage, seven months of separation, and he'd landed on his feet while she'd been too busy surviving cancer to process the collapse of everything else.

"Your serve," he called out, spinning his racquet.

Elena's throat caught. She reached for her water bottle, condensation slick against her palm. The first sip stuck somewhere behind her sternum, a reminder that swallowing — like everything else — required conscious effort now.

They'd met on this court. She'd been wearing her hair in a messy bun then, laughing when he'd deliberately smashed a ball into the glass wall just to make her jump. He'd bought her a hat afterward — a ridiculous pink visor she'd worn ironically, then sincerely, then not at all when the casual cruelty of his affairs had made her feel like a joke she hadn't understood.

"You're staring," Mark said, bouncing the ball.

"Thinking." Elena adjusted her hat again. "About how you always double-fault when you're nervous."

His racquet stilled. "I'm not nervous."

"You should be."

She served. The ball cleared the net, caught the back corner of his service box, kicked up chalk. Mark didn't move. He stood watching her, something like recognition dawning in his posture, in the way his shoulders dropped. He saw it now — what the hat concealed, what the cancer had taken, what the distance between them had made irreversible.

"El—"

"Don't." Her second serve smashed into his backhand, impossible to return. "Play."

The rally built, their longest in months. Each shot more precise, more deliberate, until the glass walls trembled with the force of everything they couldn't say. When Mark finally missed, his shot sailing wide, Elena didn't cheer. She simply walked to the baseline, removed her hat, and let him see what she'd become.

Her water bottle sat untouched on the bench. Some things, she realized, you had to learn to choke down.

"Your serve," she said again, and this time, she didn't look away.