Chapter Twelve #2
By evening, the SportsBeat post has been picked up by four additional outlets.
Two of them are aggregate sites with the journalistic standards of a Twitter reply section, and two of them are actual sports blogs with audiences large enough to matter.
By eight o’clock, my name is trending in California.
Not nationally. Not yet. But California is enough.
I sit on my couch with the television on and no volume, watching the city lights outside my floor-to-ceiling windows, and do the math.
The variables are not cooperating. Lena has commented on two more posts by other accounts in the last three hours, each comment carefully phrased to imply knowledge without confirming anything.
She’s extraordinarily good at this. I have to give her credit for pure technical execution, even as I want to throw my phone into the wall.
The thing about Lena’s strategy, and she absolutely has one, is that it doesn’t require proof.
She doesn’t need to name Ava. She doesn’t need a photograph of us together.
All she needs is the sustained implication of something, the suggestion of a story, and the media will construct the rest themselves.
Sports bloggers with nothing concrete to write about will speculate.
The speculation becomes the headline. The headline becomes the narrative.
And the narrative, once it exists, is almost impossible to kill.
I’ve watched this happen to other players. I never thought it would happen to me, mostly because I always kept the parts of my life worth protecting either absent or invisible. There was nothing to weaponize.
Until Ava.
Which is not her fault, and not something I’d trade, and also an objective complication I need to handle before it handles me.
My phone buzzes with a text from a number I don’t recognize. I open it, expecting another media inquiry.
It’s a screenshot.
Sent from a burner format Lena has used before.
She has a method, a particular style with the contact name left blank and the number always ending in the same three digits, which tells me she either doesn’t know I’ve clocked the pattern or doesn’t care.
I’m betting on the latter. She wants me to know it’s her.
The screenshot is of a photo taken from outside Ink District’s window, angled through the glass toward the interior.
Slightly blurred, shot from a distance, but it’s entirely legible.
I’m in Ava’s tattoo chair, shirt off, Ava bent over my ribs with her machine in her hand, completely absorbed in her work, unaware of anyone outside.
Taken last Tuesday.
I sit with this for a moment, the cold, flat stillness I use before critical pitches, when everything needs to go quiet and clear, and the only thing that matters is what’s directly in front of me.
She has the damn photo.
Whether she posts it is a different question, and the answer to that depends entirely on what she wants.
If she wants leverage, this is it, a reminder she has something she can use, a negotiating position she hasn’t played yet.
If she wants to detonate the entire situation, she posts it tonight and watches the fallout.
Lena is smarter than the second option. She’s always been smarter than the second option.
But smart people do stupid things when they feel cornered. And I’ve made my position on Lena Hart abundantly clear over the past several weeks.
I pick the phone back up. Look at the screenshot again. Look at Ava in it, focused, entirely present, completely unaware of the camera outside her window.
There’s a particular quality of anger I don’t often feel. The cold kind rather than the hot kind. The kind that doesn’t push or shout but settles in and calculates. It’s the same quality I bring to a batter I’ve already decided to strike out.
It’s not fury, but certainty.
This ends on my terms.
I don’t respond to the number. Reactive moves are bad moves, and I learned that lesson young enough to have it embedded. I put the phone down and plan. I think through what I know, what Lena knows, what she’s likely to do with it, and what I’m going to say to Ava tomorrow.
Because Ava needs to know about the image before she sees it somewhere else.
And she needs to hear from me, in person, not over a screen, that I’m not running scared, not walking back anything, and not letting Lena Hart dictate how this story ends.
There’s a voicemail from management’s office when I wake up, left at seven fifteen, which means someone was at their desk early enough to be worried.
The gist—the posts have their attention. The extension timeline remains on track. They have full confidence in me as the cornerstone of their pitching staff.
And then, almost as an afterthought, ‘We’d appreciate a low profile over the next few weeks, Reece. Just until this settles.’
I listen to it twice, standing in my kitchen in the early light with my coffee going cold on the counter.
Then I delete it.
Not because I’m ignoring management, I’m not stupid, but because the advice is noted and already bumping up against what I know with equal certainty—a low profile doesn’t fix this.
The photo exists. Lena is circling. The only thing sitting quietly buys me is more time for someone else to shape the story.
I’m a pitcher. I don’t wait for the batter to set the pace.
Tonight, I’m going to see Ava, and we are going to talk about all of it.
The photo, the contract, Lena, and the three months management wants clean.
We’re going to talk in the same room, with her face in front of me and not behind a screen, and I’m going to make the case I’ve been building since approximately the second she rolled her eyes at fifty thousand people chanting my name.
She’s worth the complication.
I’m worth the risk.
And Lena Hart is about to find out what happens when I decide to stop playing defense.
I drain the cold coffee, grab my keys, and head for practice.