Seventh Inning Stretch

Elena adjusted the baseball cap pulled low over her eyes, though the brim couldn't quite hide the redness around them. The stadium roared around her—thirty thousand people cheering, drinking, living—while she sat frozen in row 42, seat 7, the same seat Mark had bought for her three seasons ago.

She'd kept running after he left. Literally running. Five miles every morning, lungs burning, legs pumping, as if motion could outpace the hollow ache in her chest. Her therapist said it was avoidance. Elena called it survival.

The crowd erupted as a player connected with the ball, sending it soaring toward the left field fence. Baseball had been Mark's religion. He'd explained the statistics, the strategy, the quiet poetry of the sport with such infectious passion that she'd learned to love it too. Now the crack of the bat just echoed like a memory she couldn't quite shake.

She missed Brewer, their golden retriever, more than she'd ever admit. Mark had kept him—the house, the dog, the life they'd built. Elena got the cat and the apartment that suddenly felt too large for one person. Minx, their indifferent black cat, was currently ignoring her at home, probably asleep on Elena's favorite pillow, the one that still smelled faintly of Mark's shampoo.

"You alright?" The woman beside her asked, passing a pretzel Elena hadn't ordered.

Elena hesitated, then accepted it. "First time back since... since things ended."

The woman nodded knowingly. She was maybe sixty, silver hair tucked beneath a faded team cap. "My husband and I split twenty years ago. Baseball season was the hardest. Every song, every smell." She gestured toward the field. "But you know what? The game keeps going. Innings end. New ones begin."

Elena looked at her, really looked. The woman's eyes crinkled with something like hope, not pity.

"Thanks," Elena said, and for the first time in months, she didn't feel like running.