Water Damage at the Bottom of the Ninth

The dishwasher had been running for two hours before I noticed the water spreading across the kitchen floor. By then, the Yankees were down by three runs in the eighth inning, and Sarah's boxes were still stacked in the hallway, unclaimed despite three months of polite emails and one angry voicemail I'd deleted before sending.

I shut off the dishwasher and watched dirty water pool around the base of the refrigerator. Somewhere above, a neighbor was taking a shower—the pipes groaned like they always did at 11 PM. The cable flickered, the game stuttering into pixelated chaos before cutting to black entirely. Of course. Of course it would happen tonight.

Baseball had been Sarah's thing. She'd explained the rules to me on our first date, her hand warm on my thigh, her voice patient and amused when I asked why a walk wasn't considered running. She'd laughed—a real laugh, not the polite one she'd developed toward the end.

I grabbed a towel and dropped it onto the flooding floor. Dark circles bloomed immediately. The superintendent's phone went to voicemail. Again.

The apartment was too quiet without the game. I could hear myself breathing, could hear the refrigerator's low hum. Sarah had loved this silence. I'd filled it with nervous chatter, with questions she'd stopped bothering to answer honestly.

"You're always running," she'd said the last time, not looking up from her phone. "Running from conversations, running from decisions, running toward the next distraction."

I'd thought she meant the literal running—my morning jogs, my weekend 5Ks. But that wasn't it at all.

The water was seeping into the living room carpet now. I sat on the couch and watched it spread, dark and inevitable. The cable box blinked a single red light at me, like an accusation. On the floor beside the couch, Sarah's baseball cap from that game we'd attended—her company's seats, right behind home plate—still sat where she'd left it. I hadn't moved it. I hadn't moved anything.

The bottom of the ninth. No outs. Nobody up to bat. Just me, sitting on a dry patch of carpet while my apartment flooded around me, finally learning how to stay in one place.