The Ungame

The ball hit the padel court with that satisfying hollow sound—tok, tok, tok—like punctuation marks in a conversation we'd stopped having years ago. Across the net, Marcus moved like he always did: fluid, predatory, exactly the man I'd fallen for at twenty-three. Now at forty-two, he was a stranger I happened to share a mortgage with.

"Your form's off," he said, not unkindly. "You're thinking too loud."

I wasn't thinking. I was bearing witness to my own dissolution, standing there in the sticky heat of another Tuesday night at the club, playing padel with a man whose sleeping back I knew better than my own reflection. Somewhere between the serve and the volley, my marriage had become a zombie—shambling forward through routine, sustained not by life but by momentum alone.

"Remember that weekend in the Smokies?" I asked suddenly. "When we got between a mother bear and her cubs?"

Marcus missed the return. The ball sailed past him, hitting the fence with a lonely clatter. He looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in months. "We could have died that day."

"Should have," I said, and meant it.

The silence that followed was heavy with all the things we didn't say: the affairs we'd each half-heartedly attempted, the nights spent staring at separate screens, the way we'd somehow become roommates who occasionally had duty sex like tribute payments to a dead god.

"I met someone," Marcus said quietly.

The relief was immediate and shameful. "Good."

"She plays padel, actually."

I laughed—really laughed—for what felt like the first time in years. "Of course she does."

That night, I packed without crying. Some deaths you just bear. The marriage had been over for ages anyway; we'd just been too cowardly to bury it. As I drove away from the house we'd made, I rolled down the windows and finally breathed. I was no one's wife now. No one's roommate. Just a woman who played terrible padel and was, for the first time in a decade, entirely, terrifyingly alive.