The Last Vitamin

The lightning struck at 3:14 AM, illuminating the empty padel court behind our apartment complex. I counted the seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—before thunder rattled the windowpane. Sarah used to say lightning never struck the same place twice. She was wrong about that, too.

I swallowed the vitamin D pill with lukewarm coffee, bitter like the end of our seven-year marriage. The bottle on the counter still said 'his' in Sharpie, another artifact of the life we'd built together like a house of cards.

Outside, a fox trotted across the court—sleek, copper-colored, impossibly graceful. It paused, head cocked, watching me through the glass with eyes that seemed to know everything. Sarah had wanted a dog. I'd said no, too much responsibility. Now I couldn't even keep a houseplant alive.

The baseball glove sat in the corner of the living room, gathering dust since our son's last game three years ago. He'd stopped calling after I missed his championship match for a meeting that never happened. Some failures you don't get to bat again.

I checked my phone for the first time in hours. One missed call. Sarah.

"They found the tumor," her message read. "It's back."

The fox outside dipped its head and vanished into darkness. Lightning forked across the sky, sudden and brutal. I reached for the vitamin bottle—her handwriting, our life together in a plastic cylinder—and understood something about second chances.

Some games go into extra innings. You just have to be standing there when it matters.