The Lightning Deal

Marcus had been running on fumes for three weeks, ever since Elena walked out with nothing but a backpack and their daughter's baseball glove.

"Bullshit," he said now, staring at the projection screen.

"Excuse me?" Trevor, the wunderkind analyst half his age, blinked.

"The numbers. They're bull, Trevor. You're projecting a growth curve that would make a rocket scientist blush."

Outside, lightning fissured the sky, illuminating the conference room in harsh white. Someone had left the window cracked, and the storm was already breathing inside.

"Marcus," Sarah said, "we've been over this. The bulls are routing. If we don't position now—"

"Now?" He laughed, and it sounded jagged even to him. "You want me to sell these clients a pig in a poke while I can't even remember the last time I saw my kid hit a baseball?"

The room went quiet. That was the thing about workplace tragedies — they always had an audience.

"Maybe you should go home," Trevor said, too gently.

Marcus stood. The lightning flashed again, closer this time, and for a second he saw it all — the lying awake at 4 AM, the palm sweating over emails that could mean everything or nothing depending on which way the wind blew, the hollow feeling that somewhere along the line, he'd become exactly the kind of person his father warned him about.

"You know what?" he said. "I think I will."

He walked out without his laptop, without his badge. Into the storm that was finally breaking properly, rain sheeting down, running toward something he couldn't name yet but was somehow more real than anything in that glass tower.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. A text from Elena. One word: *Baseball.*

The lightning illuminated the message as he hailed a cab, and for the first time in a long time, he wasn't running away anymore.