The Seventh Inning Stretch

Marie stood in the bathroom, the fluorescent light unforgiving as she examined the gray hairs at her temples. Another vitamin regimen—biotin this time—sat on the counter, promises in amber bottles. At forty-five, she'd never worried about aging until David stopped looking at her.

The cat, Barnaby, wound around her ankles, his motor purr the only honest affection she'd felt in months. David had brought him home six years ago, a gesture from the version of her husband who still tried. Now David was at another baseball game, season tickets he'd purchased without consulting her, the seats Section 114, Row J—where she'd never sat.

She swallowed the vitamin with tap water, thinking of the text she'd found last month: "Same time next week?" Not an affair, presumably. Just something else that didn't include her.

Barnaby leaped to the counter, knocking David's baseball cap into the sink. The worn navy fabric, the faint salt line from sweat—these were the textures of him she knew now. Not his thoughts, not his fears. Not the way his breath used to catch when she bit his shoulder in the dark.

The mirror showed her a woman she didn't quite recognize, somewhere between who she'd been and who she was becoming. Her hair, now pulled back in the severe knot David hated, revealed a face like a question mark.

She thought of her sister's warning: "Men don't leave happy marriages." But David wasn't leaving. That was the problem—he'd simply stopped arriving.

Marie rescued the cap from the sink, smoothed the brim. She'd wear it to dinner tonight. Not as a gesture, but as a question. Either he'd notice the way it exposed her gray hairs and unadorned face, or he wouldn't.

Barnaby watched, yellow eyes unblinking, as Marie placed the cap on her head. The mirror reflected someone new—someone she might become, if she could stop waiting for the seventh inning stretch of a marriage that had ended innings ago.

The door clicked. David's key in the lock.

Marie didn't move. Let him see her first. Let him see who she was, now that she'd stopped being what he wanted.

The vitamin dissolved on her tongue, bitter and necessary. Like the truth.