The Long Inning

The seventh inning stretch couldn't come fast enough. I watched David from the kitchen window, standing by the grill while the baseball game blared from the portable radio on the patio table. He'd been distant for months, but lately it felt like he was somewhere else entirely – like he'd never really left wherever he went during those business trips to Chicago.

The spinach salad waited on the counter, already wilting in the summer heat. He used to love this recipe, back when we still cooked together, back when we still did anything together. Now he came home from those trips smelling like hotel soap and expensive cologne, checking his phone at dinner, guarding it like it contained state secrets instead of whatever it was he actually did for that consulting firm.

I should have trusted my instincts. The recruiter who'd called me last week had said my security clearance was still active, that they could use someone with my particular skill set. I'd turned them down, telling myself I was done with that life. But old habits died hard, and three days later, I'd installed the monitoring software on his laptop anyway.

The file I found wasn't what I expected. No affairs, no secret gambling debts, no second family hidden in the suburbs. Just spreadsheet after spreadsheet of figures – projections, margins, something about leveraging assets against the pension fund of the manufacturing company where I'd worked for twenty years before they "downsized" me out of existence. The same company David's firm had been hired to "restructure."

He came inside as the game went to commercial, baseball cap still on, not meeting my eyes. "Something smells good," he said, but we both knew it didn't anymore.

"David," I said, and the name felt strange in my mouth. "Who's been paying for those trips to Chicago?"

He froze, his back to me, and in that moment I understood everything – how he'd tried to protect me by keeping me in the dark, how he'd sold his integrity to save what remained of our financial security after my layoff, how we'd both become people we never intended to be. The spinach on the counter kept wilting, the baseball game droned on, and somewhere outside, summer was ending.

"It's almost over," he said, and I couldn't tell if he meant the game or us. Either way, he was right.