Shallow End, Bottom of the Ninth

Elena hadn't been to a baseball game since the summer her father died. Seven years later, here she was: thirty-four, newly single, drinking lukewarm beer at a minor league ballpark because her sister had bailed and refused the refund.

The beer vendor's dog—a Golden Retriever wearing a custom jersey—danced on its hind legs for treats. The crowd roared. Elena checked her phone. No message from Marcus. Not since the fight.

Swimming had been their thing. Every Sunday morning for two years, they'd lap the university pool together, sometimes racing, sometimes drifting side by side in silence. Marcus called it their meditation. Elena called it the only time her brain stopped spinning.

Three weeks ago, she'd asked him to move in. He'd said he wasn't ready to be a stepfather to her six-year-old niece, whose mother—Elena's sister—had relapsed and disappeared again. Marcus said he loved her. He said he couldn't be what she needed. He said a lot of things, swimming backward through his own excuses.

The baseball game dragged on. Innings bled into each other. The dog slept beneath the vendor's stool. Elena thought about her niece, currently with their mother two hours away, safe for now. The custody papers sat unsigned on Elena's kitchen counter.

"You okay?" The woman beside her asked. "You've been crying since the seventh inning."

Elena hadn't realized. The dog lifted its head, watching her with that terrible patient understanding animals seemed to possess.

"I'm fine," Elena said. "Just remembering something."

In the pool, Marcus had once grabbed her ankle underwater, scaring her half to death before surfacing with that grin. The chlorine taste on his lips when she kissed him. The way they'd raced toward the deep end, him always letting her win by a stroke.

The vendor's dog barked at a foul ball. The game went into extra innings. Elena stood up. She didn't need to swim laps to understand what she had to do next. She didn't need Marcus to sign those papers. She didn't need to keep swimming in the shallow end of her own life.

"Actually," Elena told the stranger, "I'm better than fine."

She walked toward the exit, toward the niece who needed her, toward the deep water where she finally learned to swim alone."