Warning Track

The seventh inning stretch arrived like a reprieve from a sentence I hadn't realized I was serving. The crowd rose around us, a sea of strangers united in ritual, while I remained rooted in my plastic seat, nursing a flat beer that had gone warm somewhere around the fourth inning.

"You look good, Sarah."

The voice came from behind me—familiar yet distorted, like a song played in the wrong key. I turned and found myself staring at David, my former best friend, the man whose wedding I'd declined three years ago. His hair was different now: thinning at the temples, gone mostly silver, though he couldn't be much past forty. The transformation unsettled me more than it should have.

"David." His name felt foreign on my tongue. "What are you doing here?"

"Season tickets. Section 114, same as always." He gestured toward the seats behind home plate, where his wife—my ex-colleague, Katherine—waited with patient eyes. "We saw you from across the aisle. Your hair... it's longer."

I self-consciously touched the loose ponytail I'd let grow out after the promotion. "And yours is thinner."

He laughed, but the sound was hollow, like a baseball bat hitting nothing but air. "Fair enough. Look, about what happened—"

"I didn't want to come to your wedding, David. Not because I was jealous, but because I'd slept with her six weeks before you proposed." The words tumbled out, harsh and jagged. "She never told you, did she?"

The color drained from his face like beer from a broken bottle. On the field, the batter connected with a pitch—the crack echoing through the sudden silence between us. David's eyes found mine, and for a moment, I saw the friend I'd lost, the one who'd held my hair back when I drank too much in college, who'd taught me to keep my eye on the ball.

"The game's almost over," he said finally, his voice barely audible above the crowd. "Katherine and I... we're trying. For a baby."

The baseball sailed over the left field fence. The crowd roared. I watched David walk away, his shoulders slumped like he'd missed the easiest pitch of his life, and understood that some friendships, like some games, end with runners on base and no way to bring them home.