I pick up my bag and walk to my car.
The city hums around me, indifferent and enormous, and somewhere across it, Ava is probably back at home in her apartment with the string lights and the art on every wall, and I’m not there.
And for the first time in my adult life, I’m choosing patience over momentum, the person over the play, and to sit with the wanting instead of doing what I always do, which is throw until my arm hurts enough to drown it out.
I’ve been calling it discipline for years. Training, sacrifice, and work. What it actually was, in a lot of cases, was avoidance with better PR.
Not anymore.
I start the engine and pull out of the lot.
The stadium lights are still on behind me, blazing against the night sky the way they always are on game nights, indifferent to the score, indifferent to what happened out there, built for brightness regardless.
It’s not going to be tonight.
Ava’s not ready tonight.
Not yet.
But she will be…
Soon.
Chapter Seventeen
Reece
The bad game lives in my bones for twenty-four hours.
Not the physical kind of bad, a sore shoulder, a tired arm, the normal byproduct of a heavy workload, but the kind where you walk off the mound knowing you let fifty thousand people down, and the worst part is you don’t care as much as you should. You’re standing in the middle of a stadium the size of a small city, and the only thought in your head is whether Ava knows she’s the reason every pitch went sideways.
Apparently, that’s what rock bottom looks like for me. Not a blown ERA. Not a loss in the standings. A woman-shaped hole in the middle of my chest and zero pitches finding the strike zone.
Coach pulled me aside after. He didn’t yell. Didn’t need to. He sat in his office with his arms crossed, his game face on, and told me to figure out whatever I had going on in my personal life, because the team needed me present, and I was anything but. He was right, and we both knew it, and I walked out of there feeling about twelve years old.
The drive home took forever. I ordered food I didn’t eat. Sat on my couch until two in the morning, running through the same loop—bad game, Ava’s voice on the phone two weeks ago telling me she won’t be the reason my career falls apart, Lena’s posts, the photographs outside the studio, the look on Ava’s face the last time I saw her before everything went sideways.
Somewhere around three a.m., I stopped feeling sorry for myself and started getting angry, not at Ava or even at Coach Bishop, but at myself for watching the whole thing spiral and doing nothing about the source.
I’ve had twenty-four hours to sit with it.
I’m done sitting.
The thing about Lena Hart is she is never hard to find.
She operates on the principle that visibility is power, and she has built her entire career on it. She posts her location before she arrives anywhere. She tags the restaurants, the events, the charity galas she attends, all in four-inch heels, with a glass of champagne and a smile calibrated for maximum impact.
I pull up herInstagramwhile Mack drives us to the Cougars Foundation Spring Gala, an event I’ve been dodging for three weeks and can no longer avoid without raising the kind of questions I’d rather not answer. The venue is the Meridian Hotel, with black tie optional—an open bar is definitely not optional in my experience.
Her story from forty minutes ago—a mirror selfie, the Meridian lobby in the background, caption reading…
Ready for tonight:)
@MeridianHotel @CougarsFoundation
Perfect.
“You’ve got that face,” Mack says from the driver’s seat.
