“My numbers aren’t dipping.”
“Not yet.”
The two words land the way he intends them to.
He’s good at this.
“What are you asking me, Coach?”
He looks at me for a long moment. “Stay away from Ink District. Give the blogs nothing new to work with, let this cycle through the news, and come out the other side clean.” He picks up a pen, turns it once in his hand. “The extension needs a clearrun. I’m not the one offering it, but I am the one management consults. You want to know what I tell them? I tell them you’re focused, professional, and the right investment. I want to keep telling them that.”
The room is very quiet.
I think about what Ava said in the studio the other night, her voice even, her hands not quite steady. ‘He’s not wrong about it, Reece. He’s seen it happen too many times to be wrong.’She knows her father. She knew this conversation was coming before I did.
I think about the photograph on Lena’s burner number, the extension Derek spent ninety seconds telling me was within reach, the management voicemail I deleted, and the way the word ‘low profile’sat in my stomach like something indigestible.
I think about Ava on my tailgate at midnight, eating tacos, saying‘the other shoe was going to drop,’Ava in her studio with her machine humming, and the city quiet outside, and Ava’s handwriting in the margin of a design sketch I wasn’t supposed to see with a small arrow pointing to nothing, labeled ‘here.’
Bishop is watching me the way he watches batters working through counts—patient, still, and reading the micro-movements.
I am a man who does not lie to his coaches. I’ve never had cause to because I’ve never had anything worth hiding.
I keep my face even and my voice steady and say. “I appreciate the advice.”
He nods once. Accepts this. Files it. Probably, in the same place, he files all the other versions of all the other stories he’s heard in thirty years of managing athletes.
“Drink more water during the afternoon session,” he says, which is his way of ending things. “You’re losing it faster in the heat.”
“Yes, sir.”
I leave.
The corridor back to the field takes approximately forty-five seconds to walk. I know because I count my steps without meaning to, the way you count things when your brain needs somewhere to put itself while the more important machinery runs underneath.
Forty-five seconds is enough time to understand several things simultaneously.
The first is Bishop doesn’t know. Not definitively. He suspects, he’s too sharp not to suspect, but he doesn’t have confirmation, and a man with confirmation doesn’t ask the questions he asked. He asks different ones. Bishop asked the questions of someone building a case with incomplete evidence, which means Lena’s photograph hasn’t been posted, she’s still holding it, and the timeline is still mine to work with.
The second is that he wasn’t cruel in there. He wasn’t acting out of obstruction or ego. He genuinely believes what he said. He’s watched careers erode under the specific pressure he’s describing. His concern for my contract and his concern for Ava are the same concern expressed from the same source, a man who has seen too many things go wrong from exactly this starting position.
The third, which settles over me with the same flat certainty as the other two…
It doesn’t change anything.
The afternoon session runs until four. I throw another bullpen, this one overseen by our pitching coach with Bishop watching from the dugout rail. I’m aware of his presence in a peripheralway I’m aware of everything during a session, registered, noted, and not dwelled on.
My command is precise. My spin rate, I’ll find out later from the analytics board, is the highest it’s been in six weeks. I hit seventeen consecutive targets, which is a bullpen record for me in a single session.
Mack catches everything without comment, which is his version of loud approval.
Afterward, in the showers, Martinez sidles up with the expression of a man who considers himself a credible source of information. “Bishop pulled you in this morning.”
“He did.”
“And?”
“We discussed hydration.”
