The Last Inning

The fluorescent lights hummed their usual 3 AM frequency as Marcus sat at his desk, feeling like a zombie moving through the ruins of his career. At forty-two, he'd become the dead man walking of the firm—too expensive to keep, too proud to fire outright. They'd been starving him out for months: the choice accounts reassigned, the meetings he wasn't invited to, the way his colleagues' eyes slid past him in the hallway like he was already a ghost.

He peeled an orange he'd brought from home, the citrus scent cutting through the stale office air. His daughter had left it on the counter with a note: "Don't forget to eat, Dad." She was at college now, and every small act of care felt like both a blessing and a knife twist. How had he become this man alone at his desk at 3 AM, obsessing over spreadsheets that meant nothing?

Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, a cat sat on the fire escape, watching him through the glass. It had appeared three nights ago—a black cat with mismatched eyes, one amber, one blue. Marcus had started leaving it water, then一小 portions of his sandwich. Now it waited for him, a silent witness to his slow-motion disintegration.

His phone buzzed. Sarah.

"You coming home?" she asked, and he heard the exhaustion he'd put there.

"Soon. Just finishing the Morrison account."

"Marcus, we need to talk about the baseball tickets. Season starts next month."

His grandfather had taken him to his first game when he was six. They'd had season tickets for twenty years, through three apartments and two houses and the birth of Emily. Those seats were where he'd proposed, where they'd celebrated promotions and mourned miscarriages. Baseball was the architecture of their marriage.

"I know," he said. "I'll renew them."

"Marcus—"

"I said I'll renew them."

He hung up and stared at the Morrison account, numbers blurring together. The cat outside shifted, tail twitching. He thought about walking out, just grabbing his coat and never coming back. But there was the mortgage, Emily's tuition, the carefully constructed life that had become a prison of his own making.

The orange peel lay on his desk like a small, bright catastrophe.

Marcus stood up, went to the window, and pressed his palm against the glass. The cat pressed its paw to meet his through the barrier between them. Somewhere in the distance, a train horn sounded. The inning was almost over, and he still hadn't decided whether to swing or take the pitch.