The Last Inning

The baseball card sat on her desk, edges worn soft from twenty years of handling. 1993, the year her father died. The year she stopped caring about the game.

"Katherine, the CEO wants those projections by morning."

She nodded at Mark, not bothering to explain that the projections were already done, sitting in a folder on her desktop. The same folder she'd opened three times this morning, each time staring at the numbers that meant nothing. The corporate bull session yesterday had lasted four hours—four hours of men in expensive suits arguing about growth metrics while Katherine thought about how her father had taught her to keep score.

"Cat," Mark said, "you okay?"

Only her father had called her Cat. Mark had picked it up last month, trying too hard to be charming, trying too hard to be anything but the ambitious junior VP who'd steal her desk if she showed weakness.

"Fine," she said. "The projections are fine."

She pushed the baseball card into her pocket and walked to the window. Their office overlooked the old stadium, now a luxury development. The place where she'd learned to calculate ERA, where her father had explained that sometimes you struck out, sometimes you hit it out of the park, but you always took your cuts.

The corporate world was just baseball with worse uniforms and more lying. You stood at the plate, waited for the pitch, and sometimes the umpire called it wrong no matter how well you played. The difference was, in baseball, you knew the rules.

Her phone buzzed. Her mother, again. "Have you talked to your brother? He's saying the will—"

"I have to go, Mom."

Katherine hung up. Outside, the sun dipped behind the stadium ruins. She thought about the card in her pocket, about her father's voice explaining the sacrifice bunt, about how sometimes you gave up something small to win something bigger.

She turned back to her computer. Opened the projections. Made one change—small but significant, something she'd noticed months ago but never mentioned because it wasn't her job, because she'd learned that playing it safe was safer than being right.

Then she emailed the CEO directly.

"Bullshit," Mark would say tomorrow when he found out. But Mark had never understood that sometimes you had to swing for the fences even when the count was full.