“The system keeps changing.”
“The system isevolving.”
She gives me a look that a less restrained person would call withering. “Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to regardless.”
“Do you actually think he’s not coming back?”
The question lands quietly. I pick up my pencil again and look at the sketch. The wing is good, no, better than good. The memorial piece is going to be one of my best, and I’m going to give it everything I have. I’m going to be proud of it, and it’s going to have absolutely nothing to do with Reece Steele, sports blogs, or any of the noise currently filling my inbox.
“I think…” I say carefully, “… that right now the only thing I can control is work. So, I’m focusing on my work.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I’ve got.”
The week moves the way weeks do when you put your head down and refuse to look up. Client after client, session after session. A full backpiece in progress for a firefighter who drives three hours to see me and never complains about the timetable. A delicate floral half-sleeve for a woman who cried at the consultation and laughed through every session since. A geometric piece for a nineteen-year-old who saved for eight months and shook my hand so formally when he arrived, I nearly laughed.
This is my world. Not the sports blogs. Not the DMs. Not the four hundred thousand follower producers who want my ‘perspective.’
My world is a needle, a design, and the particular trust required for someone to let you make a permanent mark on their body. My world is the moment a piece comes together under my hands, the client looks in the mirror, and something shifts in their face like relief, recognition, grief made visible, or love made permanent. My world is this studio, these walls, and these designs stacked in folders going back six years.
I am not a supporting character in someone else’s sports story.
I’m the main character of mine.
Friday afternoon, between appointments, I pull out my personal sketchbook, not the client commission folder, the private one I keep in my station drawer and never show anyone, and I sketch. No commission. No brief. No client expectation to meet. Just my hand, my pencil, and the particular freedom of drawing something because I want to.
Forty minutes later, I’ve filled three pages. A bird mid-flight. A pair of hands. A rough city skyline with a stadium on one side and a storefront on the other, smaller than the surrounding buildings, but somehow the most detailed thing on the page.
I close the sketchbook before I can analyze what any of it means.
Saturday morning arrives the way Saturdays do in a studio near a stadium, except it’s quiet. Normally, by now, the street would be thick with jerseys and anticipation, the steady pull of fans drifting toward the gates. Today, there’s nothing. No crowd. No hum building toward first pitch. The ballpark sits still, all steel and shadow.
Dad has an away game, and the team left yesterday. I know Reece’s schedule the way I know my own coffee order, without meaning to, without being able to stop.
Zoe comes in at ten for the early appointments and stays through lunch.
My noon client cancels. I use the hour to refine the memorial wing commission, adding depth to the primary feathers, and to check the proportions three times, because this is the kind of piece you don’t rush or get wrong. By one, I’m satisfied with the pencil draft and start transferring it to the digital program I use for final stencils.
At one forty-seven, the bell above the door chimes.
I don’t look up. “We’re by appointment only. Number’s on the door.”
“Yeah,” Zoe says slowly, from the front desk. “I know.”
Something in her voice makes me look up.
Reece Steele is standing inside my studio.
He’s in dark jeans and a gray jacket, no cap, no sunglasses, no attempt at any of the low-profile strategies we developed together across weeks of navigating this city without being noticed. He looks like himself. Fully himself. Which is, in my experience, the most dangerous version of him.
He’s looking at me the way he looked at me the very first time I turned around and found him standing in my shop, like he’s been waiting for exactly this, and he knows it’s going to cost him something, and he’s decided it’s worth it.
I put the stylus down with a steadiness I do not entirely feel.
Zoe is looking between us, with the expression of someone watching a match she has waited several weeks to see unfold. She has, to her considerable credit, not said a single word.
