I look at my father across the kitchen table. He’s the man who raised me to take no shortcuts and accept no reduction of myself, who has given me every tool I’ve ever used to build the life I have, who has also been human and afraid on my behalf, and sometimes gotten in the way of my living it.
“If I go back,” I say carefully. “If I figure out how to fix what I broke, you’re not going to make his life difficult?”
He holds my gaze steadily. “No.”
“His contract—”
“His numbers will speak for themselves. They always do.” He picks up his wine glass. “I coach the pitcher, Ava. The rest of it is his life.”
“When did you decide that?”
“About an hour ago,” he says, with the dry precision of a man who respects honesty over a comfortable answer.
And despite everything—the ache of the last several days, the tightness still sitting in my chest, the image of Reece’s face when he left my apartment on Sunday—I have not been able to stop turning over.
I laugh.
Short, raw, and entirely genuine.
My father looks deeply satisfied by this.
“Eat your pasta,” he says. “Then tell me about the expansion space.”
I eat my pasta.
The string lights in his kitchen are the same ones he’s had since I was twelve years old, warm amber, the same color as mine.
I’ve never noticed that before.
I notice it now, and it warms my heart.
Chapter Sixteen
Reece
As soon as the ball leaves my hand, I know I’ve fucked up.
It’s something pitchers don’t talk about publicly, the moment during a windup when the body knows it has made a mistake before the mistake is visible to anyone else. The grip is a fraction off. The release point drops two inches south of where it should be. And between the mound and the plate, there is nothing you can do about it, no corrections, no recalls, no apologies. You stand there and watch what you’ve done, travel toward someone who is very much ready to punish you for it.
Marcus Webb hits it into the left-field bleachers.
The crack echoes through Wildcat Stadium the way everything echoes here on a Friday night—enormous, layered, final. The crowd goes quiet for exactly three seconds. Then the visiting fans erupt, and I’m standing on the mound in the bottom of the fourth inning with a three-run deficit and the creeping certainty that this is going to be a very long night.
Garrett jogs out from behind the plate, pulling up his mask.
“You good?”
“Fine.” The word comes out flat and automatic. I amnotfine. I haven’t been fine in six days, and I’ve been pretending so hard the performance has apparently started bleeding into my mechanics.
Garrett studies me with the particular look catchers develop after years of watching pitchers self-destruct in real time. He’s seen the early warning signs before, but he is polite enough not to name them.
“Keep it low,” he says. “Work the corners.”
“I know how to pitch, Garrett.”
“You’re missing by four inches. I’m going to need you to know how to pitch a little better than you currently do.” He squeezes my shoulder once and jogs back.
The next batter steps in. I get two strikes on him with sliders, which is encouraging. Then I hang a curveball in the zone, and he drives it into the gap for a double. The runner on first scores standing up.
