The Seventh Inning Stretch

The cable box blinked 12:00 AM, a persistent reminder that our service had been cut three weeks ago. Marcus sat on the leather sofa, his baseball cap pulled low, watching a dark screen that reflected the hollow space between us.

'How long?' I asked, setting the glass of water on the coaster. Condensation wept down the sides like the tears I wouldn't let myself cry.

'How long what?' He didn't turn around.

'How long have you been taking her vitamins?'

The question hung in the air, heavier than the humid July night pressing against the windows. I'd found the orange bottle in his jacket pocket—prenatal vitamins, prescribed for someone else, someone who wasn't me. Someone who could give him what I couldn't.

He finally looked at me, his friend since college, the man I'd married seven years ago. 'It's not what you think.'

'Then what is it?' I gestured at the dark television, at the pitcher of water sweating on the table, at the baseball glove gathering dust on the shelf—remnants of a life we'd built together, now artifacts of a marriage slowly suffocating under the weight of disappointment.

'My sister. She's pregnant again. She asked me to pick them up.' He stood up, the motion jerky, defensive. 'You think you're the only one who's hurting? You think I don't feel it every time we see a baby stroller on the street?'

The air between us crackled with everything unsaid—the fertility treatments, the loans we'd taken, the way we'd stopped making love and started making plans instead. We'd become project managers of our own despair, scheduling intercourse, tracking ovulation, reducing intimacy to data points on a spreadsheet.

'I saw the receipt, Marcus.' My voice was quiet, steady. 'They were prescribed to Sarah at the clinic where we used to go.'

He froze. Sarah—our friend, the one who'd held me when the last treatment failed, who'd brought us soup and sympathy while secretly beginning her own journey with Marcus. Not an affair of the body, but of shared hope, shared plans for a future that didn't include me.

'I needed someone who understood,' he whispered. 'Someone who didn't look at me like I was the reason we were failing.'

Outside, a car drove past, its headlights sweeping across the room like the cameras at a baseball game, capturing this moment for no one to see. I thought about the water glass, how easily it could shatter. I thought about the vitamins, how they were meant to create life while ours dissolved.

'I need you to leave,' I said.

He grabbed his jacket, the bottle rattling in his pocket. As the door clicked shut behind him, I sat in the glow of the cable box, counting the seconds until I'd have to decide whether to stay in this game or walk away before the ninth inning.