She has appeared, quietly and without fanfare, on the backyard patio of her Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, home, where I have been waiting with Chip, her tiny 5-year-old Yorkie. She slides her fantastic, superhuman body onto the white couch without so much as a sigh. It's oddly spectacular. "I'm struggling a little bit," she says, apologizing for being late. (She hardly is.) "It's a baby. You're never on time with a baby." She says she didn't get much sleep. She's in a pink top from her new independent clothing line, Serena, and she's wearing gray sweats, no shoes. Really, the only remarkable thing is her makeup, fresh and glistening, full-on contoured cheeks, shiny lips, woolly lashes, eyebrows enhanced with confidence and certitude. It strikes me as the kind of effort you'd put into a photo shoot, or a press conference. She said she would do this thing, so she's going to do it. It's part of the job. A professional athlete today is supposed to provide thoughts after the big game, help make sense of the whole thing, put it all in cultural context—and let's face it, that last one was loaded.

The 2018 U.S. Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, New York, all the world watching Serena Williams, the most enduring athlete of all time, perform, impossibly, in top form, still, at age 36, and just a year after having a baby, after battling life-threatening blood clots, after marrying a tech giant, Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit; she had no idea what Reddit was, he had never watched a tennis match), and then...what? What is happening to Serena? She's, well, pretty upset with chair umpire Carlos Ramos for giving her a "coaching" code violation, and, what? Of course she is, after all, losing. Defeated in the first set and trailing in the second—but she's arguing with Ramos, and, what? Now she's smashed her racket on the ground, reducing it to a wobble of gut and wire, and she's demanding an apology: There are men out here that do a lot worse, but because I'm a woman, because I'm a woman, you're going to take this away from me? She's pacing, calling Ramos a "liar" and a "thief" for removing the point, and so he docks her a whole game, and thus her opponent, 20-year-old Naomi Osaka, wins her first Grand Slam, in a way no one ever wants to win her first Grand Slam, the crowd booing the umpire, Naomi sobbing, apologizing for winning, Serena telling the crowd to stop it, to let Naomi have her moment, and then of course come the tweets, and the opinion pages, and a racist cartoon, everybody shouting. The noise. The noise. The noise. Yes, yes, yes, discuss! It's part of the job.

"I love your shoes," she says to me, looking down. "They're really stylish."

"Hey, baby," she says to Chip.

I tell her I'm sorry if I'm part of the problem. All the world tugging at her.

"No, no, no," she says. "God, no."

She strikes a remorseful tone when she attempts to explain why she got so upset at Arthur Ashe Stadium, says bad stuff always happens to her at the Open.

"I've had a lot of things happen to me at the U.S. Open," she says. "I think about three or four different things. Especially in the later rounds. I think a person can be a little bit more sensitive to anything in that moment. You know, it becomes a trigger moment. When you go through a really extreme ordeal not once, not twice, not three times, it becomes a trigger moment."