What Remains in the Ninth Inning

The baseball stadium lights hummed above, that electric buzz that always made her think of hospital corridors. Sarah sat alone in Section 204, row 12, the exact seat Mark had claimed was lucky. Three years since the divorce, and still she'd bought tickets for opening day. The crowd roared around her—a collective swell of joy and frustration that felt foreign, like watching a foreign film without subtitles.

A cat darted across the field.

The whole stadium gasped. Players stopped. It was a stray calico, moving with that maddening feline indifference that said: *your rules are not my rules.* Sarah found herself standing, her hands gripping the cold metal railing. The cat paused at second base, looked up at the towering floodlights, and sat down. Clean. Like it owned everything.

She thought of Mark's cat, Buster, who'd slept between them for seven years, his purr a bridge across the widening canyon of their marriage. *Who gets the cat?* the lawyer had asked. Neither of them had wanted the reminder.

The groundskeeper approached with a net, moving slowly. The cat watched him, bored. Something about that look—utterly unimpressed by all this human ritual—cracked something open in Sarah's chest.

She reached up and adjusted her hat. Mark's hat. The fitted cap she'd stolen from the closet on her way out, a small, petty theft that had felt like claiming something real from the wreckage. It still smelled faintly of him: coconut shampoo and the particular metallic tang of the garage where he'd retreated those last months.

The cat at second base stretched, yawned, and then bolted toward the outfield fence, disappearing into the darkness beneath the bleachers. The crowd exhaled—laughing, confused, alive.

Sarah sat back down. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Mark's name on the screen: *You at the game?*

She stared at the message. The old impulse—to answer, to engage, to keep the wound fresh—rose and fell like the tides. Instead, she put the phone away. Adjusted the hat. Watched the pitcher wind up and throw.

*Strike three.*

The crowd roared. Sarah smiled, just a little. Some things, she thought, you don't have to catch. Some things, you just let them run.