The Long Season

Marcus stood before the bathroom mirror, examining his thinning hair under fluorescent light that showed everything and offered no mercy. At forty-three, he'd started the vitamin regimen—D3 for bone health, B-complex for energy, biotin for the goddamn hair—as if supplements could arrest the inevitable decay of a marriage that had lasted seventeen years.

Elena was leaving. Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but the suitcase she kept meaning to unpack from their trip to Barcelona had remained in the closet for three months, a silent accusation. Padel, she'd called it—"your midlife crisis sport." She'd refused to join him at the club, where men in expensive polo shirts swung racquets at small blue balls, pretending they were still twenty and still had options.

He found his father's old baseball glove in the garage that afternoon, the leather cracked and smelling of cedar and teenage summers. His father had died five years ago, and Marcus had never told him that he'd quit the college team to study philosophy, that he'd traded the certainty of a ball's trajectory for questions without answers. The glove fit wrong now—his fingers had thickened, his palm had grown soft with office work.

"You're not even taking the vitamins anymore," Elena said from the doorway, holding a glass of wine. "You just line them up on the counter like they're some kind of charm against getting older."

"They're for my health."

"They're for your vanity, Marcus. Just like the padel. Just like the—the way you look at yourself in mirrors."

He set the glove down on the workbench. Outside, the autumn dark pressed against the garage windows.

"I'm scared," he said, and the words felt like swallowing something sharp. "That this is it. That I'm just going to keep showing up at that club, hitting balls around a court, and you'll keep pulling away until there's nothing left to hold onto."

Elena set down her wine and crossed the garage. She picked up the glove, ran her thumb over the broken-in pocket.

"Your father taught you to catch before you could walk," she said softly. "He loved that you played. He never cared that you quit."

"He never knew."

"He knew." She looked up. "He came to every game your first year, Marcus. He saw you sitting on the bench more than you played. He told me once that watching you find your own way—not his way, not the coach's way—was the proudest he'd ever been."

The vitamin bottles rattled as Marcus leaned back against the workbench. Outside, something fell in the darkness—a branch, perhaps, or just the world settling into its own routine.

"Cancel the padel membership," Elena said. "And come inside. I made risotto."

He hesitated, then nodded. They would talk, or they wouldn't. They would stay together, or they wouldn't. But for tonight, there was dinner, and there was the possibility—that fragile, stubborn vitamin of hope—that some seasons, even the long ones, eventually end.