The Longest Inning

The vitamin bottle sat on the nightstand, a plastic monument to her attempts to fix everything that couldn't be fixed. D3, with calcium. She'd started taking them after the miscarriage, as if stronger bones could help carry the weight of what they'd lost.

Marcus watched her from the doorway, his baseball glove still slung over his shoulder. He'd been going to the batting cages three times a week since it happened—trying to hit something that would hit back, something that would make sense when it connected.

"You're going out?" Elena asked, not turning from the mirror where she was applying eyeliner with surgical precision.

"Yeah. League night."

"On a Tuesday?"

"Makeup game from the rainout."

Their cat, Barnaby, wound through Marcus's legs, purring with the indifferent warmth of a creature who'd never lost anything he couldn't replace with a nap. Marcus reached down absently to scratch behind his ears, the familiar rhythm of it almost grounding him.

"You know," Elena said, finally turning to face him, "my mother always said baseball was the most boring thing invented. Just men standing around waiting."

"It's not about the waiting. It's about being ready." Marcus paused. "For something that might never come."

She looked at him then, really looked at him, and he saw the calculation in her eyes—the way she was measuring what remained between them against what it would cost to stay.

"I'm done waiting, Marcus."

The words hung there, suspended in the humid evening air like a pitch that everyone knows will be a ball before it even leaves the hand. He nodded, once, and headed for the door.

"Take your vitamins," he said, and it wasn't an instruction or a plea. It was just the only thing left to say.

Barnaby watched him go, then jumped onto the nightstand and batted the vitamin bottle onto the floor, where it rolled in a slow, perfect arc across the hardwood.