“We don’t do this yet,” he says. “The timing is wrong.”
“The timing is never going to be right. Lena will make sure of that.” My chest aches with the specific pressure of saying the right thing when every other part of me is pulling in the opposite direction. “I need you to hear me, Reece. This isn’t me being afraid. This isn’t the worst-case scenario thinking you’ve spent six weeks talking me out of. This is me looking at a real situation with real stakes and making a choice that protects you, because you won’t protect yourself.”
“I don’t need protecting.”
“You need your career. You need the contract. You need your coach’s trust, management’s confidence, and the next five years of baseball, which are going to be the best five years of your career.” The ache in my chest spreads. “And I need not to be the reason any of that goes wrong.”
He looks at me for a long time. I watch him work through it, the arguments, the counters, the thing he almost said last night in the amber light that still sits between us unspoken and enormous.
“I’m not accepting this,” he says. Quiet. Absolute.
“You don’t have to accept it. You just have to respect it.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Y-yes.” My voice breaks on the single syllable, very slightly, and I straighten my spine and breathe through it. “There is.”
He picks up his keys from the counter. He holds them for a moment without moving to the door, and I think he’s going to say the thing, the unsaid thing from last night, and I’m not sure I could hold my position if he does.
Instead, he says, “This isn’t over.”
“Reece…”
“Not a threat. Not a pitch.” He meets my eyes for the last time before he leaves, and the look on his face is the look I’ve been cataloging since the bleachers, the one that doesn’t perform, calculate, or manage. “Just a fact. When this settles, I’m comingback. And I need you not to have talked yourself out of me entirely by then.”
He leaves.
I lock both locks. Stand in the silence. Wait for the decision to feel like the right one.
It feels like the worst one I’ve ever made.
The days that follow have a particular quality I don’t know what to do with.
The studio becomes my refuge, and the work becomes strategy. I do the thing I’ve always done when the ground shifts, I put my head down and create because creating is the only activity that requires enough of my brain to silence the rest of it. A full backpiece I’ve been building for eight months is complete. I take on two new consultations. I redesign Zoe’s station layout when she asks me to, then redesign it again when the first version bothers me.
Zoe watches all of this with the quiet attention of someone who has pieced together more than she’s been told.
She doesn’t ask. I don’t offer. We operate in the same wordless arrangement we’ve had since I hired her, except now it has a different texture. It’s softer, more careful. She starts leaving a fresh coffee on my station without being asked. She handles walk-ins with greater autonomy, redirecting people before they reach me, allowing me uninterrupted sessions. Small accommodations are offered without ceremony.
I appreciate them more than I know how to say.
The sports coverage cycles through the story in roughly four days, the way these things do, with the initial wave, then thesecondary commentary, then the inevitable pivot to the next distraction. My name drops out of the trending columns by Wednesday. The blog posts remain indexed and findable, with the caption still sitting there if anyone searches hard enough, but the active noise subsides.
What doesn’t subside is quieter and harder to track. I hear it from the periphery, the way you hear things when you’re adjacent to a world without being inside it. Zoe mentions a client who brought up the Wildcats in passing. The coffee shop near my apartment has a game on the television every afternoon. The city doesn’t stop caring about baseball because I’ve decided to.
And baseball doesn’t stop happening because it’s inconvenient for me.
I hear about Reece’s performance not because I’m looking for it, but because it is impossible to be in this city in this season and not hear about Reece Steele.
The first game after is a home game. He gives up four runs in six innings, which by the standards of the rest of his season is the equivalent of a collapse. I hear it from a client on Thursday morning, delivered without context or knowledge of its relevance to me, the same way someone might mention rain.
‘Did you see the Wildcats game? Steele had a rough one.’
I finish the shading on her shoulder and say nothing.
The second game is on the road. I don’t look it up. I find out anyway. Mack texts me, which I wasn’t expecting, a single message that reads,
Mack:He’s not okay. Just so you know.
