Curveballs in Palm Springs

The August heat in Palm Springs pressed against Lila's back like a physical weight, the way desire used to when Marcus still touched her. Their son, twelve-year-old Toby, stood on the pitcher's mound, his baseball cap pulled low, trying to look like the men he worshipped on TV.

"You're staring," Marcus said. He'd taken the seat beside her without asking, close enough that she could smell him — sunscreen and coconut sports drink and something underneath that used to be theirs.

"He looks like you," Lila said, instead of what she wanted to say: *I miss you, I hate you, I still dream about your hands.* Toby wound up and threw. Ball one.

Marcus laughed, a sound that still made something behind her ribs ache. "He has your eyes. That fox-like suspicion. Like he knows everyone's lying before they even speak."

Lila pulled her hair back from her neck, wishing she'd worn it up. "He gets that from watching us destroy each other for three years."

Theirs had been the kind of divorce that made their friends nervous, the kind where friends chose sides and nobody really won. Lila had been the one to file, but Marcus had been the one to finally stop fighting it. That was the thing that haunted her — not that they'd failed, but that he'd let her win.

"You think he knows?" Marcus asked.

"About us?" Toby threw again. Strike one, looking. "He knows everything. Children are surveillance cameras with lunchboxes."

Marcus reached for her hand, his palm warm against hers, and she didn't pull away. That was the problem, wasn't it? The moments when the bad idea felt like the only one that made sense.

"I met someone," he said.

Lila's heart performed its usual betrayal — a quick, sharp panic. "Is she kind?"

"She's nobody," Marcus said. "She's not you."

*The worst compliment he'd ever given her.*

Their son on the mound looked up then, searching the bleachers for them. For three years, Lila had missed curveballs and fly balls and the way his face lit up when he spotted them in the crowd. Marcus squeezed her hand once, then let go.

"He needs us," Marcus said. "Not like this. Not whatever we're doing."

"What are we doing?"

"Waiting," he said. "For the other shoe to drop. For the curveball we don't see coming."

Toby wound up, threw, and the batter swung and missed. Strike three. Inning over. Their son pumped his fist and jogged toward the dugout, toward his parents in the bleachers, toward the ruins of what they'd built together.

Lila stood and brushed something from her skirt — an eyelash, a memory, it didn't matter. She could do this. She could sit in the heat and watch her son play baseball and pretend her hand didn't still burn where Marcus had touched it, pretend she wasn't wondering if the new woman knew that he cried at car commercials and slept with his palm pressed against hers, every night, for twelve years.

Foxes, she thought. Cunning and beautiful and impossible to tame, and somehow always the ones who ended up caught.

"Game on," she said.

And sat back down beside her husband, watching their son become someone who would one day make better mistakes than they ever had.