The Ninth Inning

David walked into his corner office at 6 AM, another sunrise surrendered to the quarterly review. He felt like a **zombie** — hollowed out by three years of merger arbitrage, moving through motions that once resembled ambition. His father's **baseball** card collection, worth more than his 401(k), sat in a safety deposit box he hadn't visited in eighteen months.

He placed his grandfather's fedora — a **hat** too formal for modern Boston — on the coat rack. It was the last thing his father had given him, pressing it into his hands from his hospital bed. "You'll understand someday," he'd said. David was thirty-five before he started to.

The **bull** market didn't care about existential dread. Neither did the **cat** that appeared on his windowsill that morning, a calico with one ear notched from street fights. She stared at him through fifteen floors of glass like she knew something he didn't.

"What?" he asked aloud. "You think I should quit?"

The cat blinked slowly, then began grooming her paw.

David looked at his father's hat. Looked at the cat. Looked at the city waking up beneath him, indifferent to his quarterly targets.

His phone buzzed. A reminder: "Partner meeting, 9 AM."

He turned it off.

The cat had disappeared by the time he looked back, but she'd left something behind — a dead mouse, positioned perfectly on the ledge. An offering. Or maybe a warning.

David smiled for the first time in weeks. He packed his baseball glove instead of his laptop, called his mother, and drove to Fenway. Some innings you have to sacrifice to win the game. His father had taught him that. The old man was gone, but the lessons remained — sometimes about the game, sometimes about something larger.

He bought a ticket from a scalper. The sky was perfect blue. The first pitch hadn't been thrown yet, but the crowd roared like something holy was about to happen. Maybe it was. He put on the fedora. The old man would've laughed at how ridiculous he looked. He laughed too. Finally. Finally.