The Sunday Morning Padel Court

Elena sliced the papaya with surgical precision, the juice staining her fingers like guilt. Sunday morning. Marco would be here in twenty minutes for padel, their standing excuse, the thin veneer of respectability over three months of an affair that had started as casual office banter and metastasized into something voracious.

The vitamin supplements on her counter—D, B-complex, omega-3—mocked her. She was so obsessed with maintaining her body, optimizing her health, while systematically dismantling her life. Marco's wife had called yesterday. Just a friendly chat, ostensibly about the company holiday party, but there'd been something in her voice. Knowing, or suspecting.

Lightning cracked the sky outside, sudden and violent. The weather app claimed clear skies. Lies. Everything was lies lately.

Her phone buzzed. Marco: *Rain check? Literally.*

Elena stared at the message, thumb hovering. This was it—the moment she could end it. No padel, no hotel rooms during lunch breaks, no more feeling like she was living someone else's life.

But she thought about Marco's laugh, the way he looked at her like she was the only person who truly saw him. The way he made her feel visible after years of being the reliable one, the dutiful wife, the careful professional who never took risks.

She ate a piece of papaya. It was perfectly ripe, sweet and terrible.

*My place,* she texted back. *Let's pretend we never planned to play.*

The vitamins blurred through her tears. She swallowed them dry, one by one, as the lightning illuminated the wreckage she'd made of her life.