The Ninth Inning

The baseball game droned on—bottom of the ninth, two outs, and the Padres down by three. Elena checked her iphone again. Still nothing from Marcus. The notification screen remained stubbornly empty, like their bed for the past three weeks.

She adjusted the brim of her hat, a beaten-up Dodgers cap Marcus had given her on their first date. Five years ago, it had fit perfectly. Now it felt too tight, or maybe her head had grown with all the thoughts she couldn't say out loud.

"You okay, El?" David asked from the seat beside her. He'd been trying to reach her since the seventh-inning stretch, his hand hovering near her shoulder before dropping back to his popcorn.

"Just allergies," she said.

A fox trotted along the warning track behind the outfield fence—impossibly orange against the manicured green, wild and unbothered by the crowd's roar. It moved with a calm purpose, like it knew something they didn't.

"You ever notice," David said, "how animals always seem like they're exactly where they're supposed to be?"

Elena watched the fox pause, look directly at her, then slip through a gap in the fence and vanish into the shadows beneath the stands.

"Yeah," she said. "I noticed."

Her phone vibrated. Not Marcus. A text from her sister: Mom's dog, Buster, died this morning. He was seventeen.

Buster. The golden retriever who'd greeted her every time she came home from college, who'd slept at the foot of her bed through her first breakup, who'd never once questioned whether she was worthy of love. Just showed up, tail wagging, every single time.

The final out was made. The crowd groaned. People started filing toward the exits.

Elena stood up.

"You leaving?" David asked.

"Yeah," she said, pulling Marcus's hat off her head. She left it on the seat—someone else could use it now. "I think I finally figured out the score."