The Scorekeeper's Wife

Elena's vitamin collection sat on the marble counter like a pharmaceutical altar—B12 for energy, D3 for mood, fish oil for the heart she claimed was still mine. I swallowed my own without water, letting the bitter coating dissolve on my tongue. We were thirty-four, far too young for this ritual of preservation, yet there we were: two bodies trying to outrun decay while our marriage had already begun its rot.

"Padel tonight?" she asked, not looking up from her phone. Her thumbnail was bitten raw, a nervous tic I'd stopped noticing until recently.

"Can't. Meeting the guys for baseball."

Her pause was microscopic—a hitch in her breathing pattern, a flicker of something behind her eyes. "Since when do you play baseball?"

"Since Mark found a league. Tuesday nights. You knew this."

I hadn't told her. Mark had found the league yesterday, and I'd signed up this morning, desperate for any excuse to leave this apartment, to escape the way our lives had become a series of performed intimacies. But her reaction made something cold settle in my stomach.

"Right. Baseball."

She turned back to her vitamin sorting. The click-click of plastic bottles became the room's only sound.

That night, I sat in the stands of the dimly lit diamond, watching a game I didn't care about, my phone burning in my pocket. A notification appeared: Elena's location—Country Padel Club. She'd told me she was working late.

The baseball players below me swung at air, cursed, spat. A metaphor for our marriage, I thought bitterly. Swinging and missing, pretending we were still playing the same game.

And then I understood: the vitamins she was so religious about—none of the bottles matched the prescription she'd picked up last week. I'd seen the label in her purse: prenatal vitamins.

We hadn't had sex in six months.

On the field, someone hit a home run. The crowd cheered. I sat very still, watching the ball arc through the floodlights, suspended against the dark sky for one perfect moment before it began its inevitable descent.