The Last Inning

The orange peel stuck under her fingernails, its citrus scent cutting through the stale office air at 11 PM. Elena sat at her desk, the sectioned fruit forgotten on a napkin as she scrolled through her iPhone, each message from 'Mark' hitting her like a fastball she should have seen coming.

You should've told me you were married.

I thought you knew.

She remembered the baseball cap her husband David wore every Sunday—faded navy blue with the Braves logo pulled low over his eyes, especially when he came home late from those 'team-building dinners' with his coworkers. The way he'd never let her touch his phone. The hat that had sat in the same spot on his dresser for fifteen years, like a trust she'd never questioned.

Her phone buzzed again. Not from David this time.

'I'm sorry. I didn't know.'

Elena stood up, her legs unsteady. The office windows reflected her tired face, thirty-eight years of marriage reduced to this: an orange half-eaten on company stationary, glowing screens delivering betrayals in blue light, and the realization that she'd been playing in a different stadium entirely.

David's voice echoed in her memory: 'Marriage is like baseball, El. Sometimes you strike out, but you stay in the game.'

She'd thought he meant their arguments over money, his mother, the forgotten anniversaries. She hadn't realized he was talking about the whole damn sport.

Elena typed back to the other woman: 'He never mentioned you either.'

Then she opened her text thread with David. 'Coming home late again. Don't wait up.'

Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. The orange on her desk looked pathetic in the fluorescent light, its segments weeping juice onto the paper. She thought about all the Sundays she'd sat alone while David wore that hat, all the games she'd cheered at while his mind was somewhere else entirely.

Fifteen years. Nine innings. And she'd just realized she wasn't even the player she thought she was.

Elena deleted the text to David. Then she typed one to Mark's wife—the woman whose number she'd found in David's phone three weeks ago and had been too afraid to call.

'We need to talk.'

The orange peel caught the light as she tossed it into the wastebasket. Some games, you had to forfeit before the bottom of the ninth.