Unforced Error

The padel ball hit the wall with that familiar hollow thud—bouncing back at me faster than I'd expected. I missed it completely.

"You're distracted, man," Tomas said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the hem of his shirt. "Everything okay at home?"

I nodded. Couldn't tell him. Couldn't tell anyone.

We finished our set in silence. Tomas had gotten so much better since he'd joined that club. His backhand was clean now, precise. I remembered when we'd both been terrible together, hacking at tennis balls in college, broke and happy.

Now he drove a BMW and talked about quarterly returns at the firm where he'd made partner. I drove a ten-year-old Honda and worked the same data entry job I'd had since graduation.

"Come over for dinner," he said afterward in the locker room. "Sarah's making this spinach thing. It's actually good."

"Maybe another time."

"You say that every week."

"I know."

I went home to my apartment, where the cable had been cut yesterday—another expense trimmed. No distractions. Just me and the silence.

That's when I heard it.

My iphone buzzed on the counter. Not a text. A call. Her number.

Sarah.

I stared at it like it was a live grenade. The phone kept vibrating, insistent, against the granite countertop. Tomas's wife. The woman I'd been in love with for three years. The woman I'd kissed last Thursday in the parking garage after her pilates class.

"You're not answering," she'd said then, her thumb tracing my jaw. "You never answer."

I let the call go to voicemail. Then another. Then a text: *He knows. He saw the cable bill. Our dinner reservation from two weeks ago. He's asking questions.*

The spinach. She'd told him she was with her sister that night, having dinner. They'd ordered spinach something at that tapas place where I'd held her hand under the table while Tomas texted about work.

The phone buzzed again. Tomas this time.

I answered. There was no point pretending anymore.

"We need to talk," he said. His voice wasn't angry. It was worse than angry—it was broken.

"I know."

"How long?"

"Does it matter?"

"No," he said quietly. "No, I suppose it doesn't."

I watched the sun set through my window, thinking about all the Sundays we'd spent together on the padel court, all the dinners, all the years of friendship that had turned into something else entirely. Something I couldn't name but had nurtured anyway, grown in secret like a weed in a garden I was supposed to be tending for someone else.

Some friendships don't end with a bang. They end because you finally stop lying to yourself about what they were all along.