Three Strikes, You're Out

The iPhone buzzed against the nightstand at 2:14 AM, lighting up the ceiling with that pale, ghostly glow. Mara's heart hammered before her eyes even focused on the screen. Unknown number. Again.

Her cat, Buster, shifted on the duvet, his purr rumbling like a small engine against her hip. He was the only thing in this apartment that still felt steady, the only living thing that hadn't started lying to her.

Mara slid her finger across the screen, her palm slick with sweat. "Hello?"

Silence, then breathing. Then the sound that had been haunting her for three weeks: a bar. Glasses clinking. That specific laugh—nervous, wheedling—right before someone said something inappropriate.

"Please stop calling," she whispered, but the line was already dead.

This was the fourth time this week. She knew what it meant. She'd known since the night she'd seen the texts—light-hearted flirting that she'd told herself was just workplace banter, just the way people joked around the office now. But calls at 2 AM weren't banter.

Buster head-butted her hand, demanding attention. She scratched behind his ears, his fur warm and alive against her cold fingers.

Her phone pinged again. Not a call this time. A calendar notification: "Baseball game with the guys tomorrow night." The reminder he'd set weeks ago, back when they still had seasons they shared, back when she'd meant something more than a placeholder.

She curled her hand around nothing, her palm empty, her life reduced to waiting for phone calls that weren't meant for her.

Baseball was their thing, once. They'd met at a Dodgers game—second base, something about buying the wrong beer, both of them laughing. Three years of weekends at the stadium, of hot dogs and seventh-inning stretches, of the way he'd squeeze her hand during close plays. Now he was going without her. Or maybe not going at all.

The phone lit up again. His name this time.

"Mara? You up?"

She stared at his contact photo, the one from their anniversary dinner, before all of this.

"Mara? I know you're seeing the calls. I'm sorry—she's just a colleague, she's going through something, I didn't know how to tell her to stop."

Her palm tightened around the iPhone until her knuckles went white.

"A colleague who calls at 2 AM?"

"It's not like that. I promise."

Buster stood up, stretched, and jumped off the bed, abandoning her to whatever came next.

"Mara?"

"I'm done," she said, and the silence that followed felt like the space between innings, that terrible pause before everything could change. "I'm not playing this game anymore."

She ended the call, blocked the number, and lay back down as her phone went dark, wondering what it meant that she'd struck out looking, that she'd never even swung at the pitches that mattered.