He turns his head slightly, not fully, just enough for me to catch the edge of a smile.
“I know it will be.”
He walks out.
I sit in my chair in my studio in my world for a full minute after he’s gone, hands resting on my knees, the wing commission saved and ready on the screen, the ink bottles exactly where I left them, the silence mine again.
Then I pull out my sketchbook and add one more page to the three I filled on Friday.
My three o’clock arrives seven minutes later and finds me already at my station, focused, prepared, and completely in my element.
Which is, as it turns out, exactly where I’ve always been.
Chapter Nineteen
Reece
The thing about a championship-level game is that the stadium knows before you do.
Fifty-two thousand people filing in, and the air already has an edge to it, charged and electric, the way it gets when everyone in the building understands the stakes without having them explained. Standing outside the dugout during warmups, I feel it moving through the crowd in waves, the tightened breath, the too-loud voices, the particular hum of collective anticipation that has no equivalent anywhere outside a packed ballpark.
The Wildcats are one game from the divisional title.
Two months ago, a sentence like that would have made me feel like the whole world was mine.
Today I feel it distantly, through glass. Present in my body, present on this field, going through every pregame ritual with the mechanical precision of someone whose hands know what to do even when his head is somewhere else.
Stretch. Throw. Assess. Repeat.
Mack catches my last warmup pitch and stands up, rolling his shoulder. He walks the ball back to me instead of throwing it, which is what he does when he has something to say and wants my full attention.
“How’s the arm?” he asks.
“Good.”
“How’s the head?”
“Working on it.”
He studies me for a moment with the particular scrutiny of a catcher who has been calling my pitches for three seasonsand knows exactly which version of me showed up today. “She coming?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask her?”
“She knows when the games are on.” I take the ball, turning it in my fingers. “The rest is her call.”
Mack nods slowly. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, meaning I believe you, and I also think you need to locate yourself in this ballpark in the next forty minutes, because I am not catching a second straight disaster game, and I’d like this to be on record before first pitch.” He claps my shoulder. “You’ve been here before. You know what to do.”
“I know.”
“Do the thing you do.”
“The thing I do.”
