I sat there and thought about twenty-three years of marriage and all the things I’d assumed were empty space between us, and how wrong I’d been about every single one of them.

The next Saturday, I packed a cooler. Sandwiches, apples, two hot chocolates. Ray stared at me in the driveway like I’d grown a second head. “You’re coming?” he said.

“Somebody has to keep score,” I said.

Caleb was shy at first. Then in the fourth inning he hit a grounder up the middle and made it to second standing up, and I screamed so loud the umpire laughed. After the game he asked me if I was Ray’s wife, and I said yes, and he went quiet for a minute. “Are you really my aunt?” he asked.

“I am,” I said, and he hugged me like he’d been waiting two years to do it.

On the drive home, Ray told me the rest of it. “He started calling me that last spring,” he said quietly. “I told him he didn’t have to. He said his dad would want him to have one.”

I cried into my scorebook. I didn’t even try to hide it.

Ray still goes every Saturday. Now we both go. And I’ve learned something I wish I’d known at thirty instead of fifty-four: sometimes the thing that looks like betrayal is just love that didn’t know how to ask for permission.