The Seventh Inning Stretch

The iPhone buzzed in my pocket, a familiar thrum against my thigh. Sarah's name lit up the screen, glowing like an accusation in the stadium's half-darkness. Around us, the crowd roared as someone hit a double, but I could barely hear them over the blood rushing in my ears.

Three months since she'd quit without notice. Three months since she'd left me drowning in the quarterly report, the one we were supposed to finish together. The one that had cost me my promotion when I'd missed the deadline by twenty-four hours.

"Marcus, please." Her text read. "We need to talk."

I watched the baseball players shift positions on the field below. The pitcher wiped sweat from his brow, and I thought about all the times Sarah had complained about the air conditioning at work, how she'd shivered in her cardigan while I offered her my jacket. We'd been friends for four years. Had gone through divorces and job changes and the deaths of parents together. Or so I'd thought.

"What could you possibly say to me?" I typed, then deleted. The old Marcus would have heard her out. The old Marcus believed in second chances, in the complicated humanity of workplace politics, in forgiveness.

But the new Marcus knew that Sarah had been poached by our competitor two weeks before she'd quit. That she'd taken three client lists with her. That my boss had shown me the security footage of her copying files at 2 AM on her final night.

My iPhone buzzed again. "I'm pregnant."

The baseball game continued. Inning after inning, pitch after pitch. The friend beside me—Jamie, from accounting—offered me a pretzel. I shook my head. Something fundamental had shifted in me since Sarah's betrayal. A calcification around the heart. A cynicism I couldn't quite soften.

I typed: "Congratulations." Then: "Don't contact me again."

The seventh inning stretch began. Everyone stood. I stood with them, looking down at the field where grown men played a child's game with professional intensity, where friendship and loyalty and honor were still things that mattered. Where the rules were clear and everyone knew what they were playing for.

I deleted Sarah's contact.Blocked her number. Watched the baseball arc through the stadium lights, beautiful and terrible in its brief flight toward something that might catch it or might not.

Some games, you realize too late, you've been playing alone all along.