The Bull, The Bat, The Bottle

Margot stood in the bathroom, staring at the amber prescription bottles lined up like soldiers on the white porcelain shelf. Vitamin D. Vitamin B complex. Vitamin E. The supplements her husband had started taking three months before the accident, when he'd decided to get healthy, to live forever. She swallowed them dry now, one each morning, a ritual that tasted like devotion and desperation both.

She'd met him at a corporate retreat in Arizona—him the charming Wall Street trader always talking about riding the bull, her the skeptical analyst who'd somehow ended up married to him eight months later. He'd loved baseball, had played division II in college, still kept a signed Babe Ruth ball in a glass case on his desk. "It's about patience," he'd tell her, watching Yankees games from their sofa, beer in hand. "Waiting for the right pitch."

Now she waited at a baseball diamond in Queens, watching the couple in the matching Mets jerseys. The woman—hair so blond it hurt to look at it—laughed at something he said. Adam.

Her Adam.

The one who'd walked out six weeks ago with a duffel bag and no forwarding address, who'd left behind the vitamins and the baseball and the bull market jokes. Margot's fingers curled around something cold and hard in her pocket—a baseball bat she'd bought at a sporting goods store that morning. Not to hurt him. God, no. Just to hold. To remember what it felt like to grip something substantial, something that could connect with something else and make a sound.

The woman touched his arm, and Margot felt something crack inside her chest, clean and sharp as a bat meeting ball. She turned toward the parking lot, vitamins working their useless chemistry through her bloodstream, wondering what it meant that the things we collected to prove we existed survived longer than we did.