The Sixth Inning

She counted them out every morning, her movements precise as a surgeon: the white oval of the vitamin D, the amber gelcap of fish oil, the pink prescription that cost more than their first car together. Marcus watched from the doorway, his iPhone lighting up with emails he couldn't bring himself to answer. Another shareholder meeting. Another question about the merger he'd been orchestrating for sixteen months.

'You're staring,' Sarah said, not looking up from her pill organizer.

'I'm not.' He was. He always did now, inventorying the new hollows in her cheeks, the way her clothes hung loose on shoulders that had once carried their son with effortless strength.

'The baseball game starts at seven,' she said. 'Ethan promised to call.'

Their son was in Chicago, five hundred miles and a whole world away. Marcus remembered teaching Ethan to hit in their backyard, the satisfying crack of the bat, how the boy's eyes would light up when the ball sailed into the neighbor's garden. That was before. Before the diagnosis. Before the word 'palliative' entered their vocabulary.

His phone buzzed again. A text from his assistant: the merger was falling apart. The other investors had gotten cold feet. Three years of his life, sixteen-hour days, missed anniversaries and school plays—and now it might all evaporate because some twenty-something analyst didn't like the projected quarterly earnings.

Marcus looked at Sarah, really looked at her. She was sorting pills into her daily case, her hands shaking slightly. How much time had they had? Two months since the terminal diagnosis. Sixteen years of marriage compressed into sixty days.

He typed a response to his assistant: Handle it. Then powered off his phone.

'What are you doing?' Sarah asked, finally looking at him.

'The baseball game starts at seven,' he said, crossing to where she sat. 'I thought we might watch it together. Like we used to.'

She smiled, and for a moment he saw the woman he'd married, the one who drank cheap wine at baseball games and screamed at umpires and made him feel like life was something to grab with both hands.

'I'd like that,' she said.

Marcus took her hand. It was warm and fragile and devastatingly real. The merger could wait. The shareholders could wait. His son would call at seven, and they would all watch baseball together, across three time zones, connected by something as simple as a game and as complicated as love.

He picked up her vitamin bottle and placed it gently in her palm. 'Don't forget your D.'

She laughed, really laughed, and the sound was better than any deal he'd ever closed.