Chapter Thirteen
Reece
Practice starts at nine. I’m there at seven thirty, which is becoming a habit and not the healthy kind.
The stadium is quiet at this hour. There are no grounds crew dragging the infield, and only one of the bullpen coaches running sprints in the outfield, and the near-empty arena echoes that turns every footstep into an announcement.
I like it best like this. Before the crowd, before the noise, before fifty thousand people decide they have opinions about what I do with my arm.
I find the mound and stand on it for a minute doing nothing, which is something my pitching coach calls centering and the rest of the team calls Reece being weird.
Both are accurate. The clay is firm underfoot, the morning air carrying the faint smell of cut grass and fresh dirt, and I breathe it in and let the night’s accumulated nonsense settle.
Lena’s photo.
Derek’s ninety-second call.
Management’s voicemail, already deleted, but still audible in my head.
Ava’s single word, ‘tomorrow,’ and everything compressed inside it.
I roll my shoulder, find the seam on the ball in my hand, and start throwing.
By nine, the full squad is in, and the coaching staff is running drills with the focused intensity Bishop demands in the second month of the season, when early form becomes habit and habits become outcomes.
I’m paired with Mack for the first rotation, and he crouches behind the plate with the easy familiarity of several hundred sessions between us, calling signs I could read in my sleep.
I throw well. This is not a surprise. I throw well under pressure, scrutiny, and conditions that would make most people tighten up and lose their mechanics. It’s the one thing I’ve always been able to rely on. When everything else is chaos, the mound is clarity.
What’s different today is the extra weight behind each pitch. I’m not angry. Not distracted in the way the management’s voicemail implied I might be. I’m something more productive than either of those things. I’m decided.
Mack calls for a slider. I shake him off.
He frowns behind the mask. Calls for the slider again.
I throw a curveball instead, dropping it over the outside corner with the kind of late break that makes batters look foolish. It smacks into his glove at a location I aimed for before I wound up.
He stands, pulls his mask up, and gives me a look. “Everything okay?”
“Excellent.”
“You’re overthinking.”
“I’m thinking at the exact right level.”
“You shook off my sign.”
“I had a better pitch.”
“It’s a drill, Steele. You don’t need a better pitch in a drill.”
“Habits become outcomes,” I say, which is something Bishop says approximately four times a week, and Mack knows it, which means he can’t argue with it. He pulls his mask back down, crouches, and calls the next sign.
I throw what he asks for.
What I don’t do, for the entirety of the morning session, is think about Bishop.
I don’t look over at the dugout to see if he’s watching, track his movements around the field, or try to read anything into the fact he’s had three separate conversations with my pitching coach in the last ninety minutes, and each of them ended with a look in my direction.
Coach Bishop has a face made for poker. Thirty years of managing athletes have given him the ability to look at a problem with exactly the same expression he uses for everything else. I’ve tried to read him before and lost every time, so I’ve stopped trying.
The session ends. The team breaks for individual work.
Bishop finds me at the water cooler.
“Steele. My office.”
Not a question. Not an invitation. The two words carry the specific gravity of a man who hasn’t needed to raise his voice in about a decade because the tone alone does the work.
I grab my water bottle, cap it, and follow him off the field.
His office is at the end of the coaches’ corridor, past the equipment room and the analytics bay with its wall of monitors showing every pitch I’ve ever thrown in professional baseball.
I glance at those screens as we pass, split-second movement data, spin rates, approach angles, and feel the familiar, strange sensation of seeing yourself reduced to information.
Useful information. The most useful information I’ve ever produced. But still.
Bishop closes the door behind us.
His office looks the same as it always has.
It’s functional and unsentimental, the kind of space that communicates exactly what’s important to the person inside it.
Whiteboard with rotation schedules. A shelf of playbooks, spines cracked and annotated.
One framed picture on the desk facing him, not the wall.
It’s of Ava at maybe seventeen, laughing at something off-camera, entirely unaware of the shot.
I’ve been in this office half a dozen times this season, and I’ve noticed the photo every single time and managed, every single time, to notice it without noticeably noticing it, which is an athletic achievement in its own right.
He moves around the desk and sits.
“You’ve seen the blogs,” he says.
“Yes.”
“SportsBeat, then three others. My name doesn’t appear, but Ava’s studio does.” He folds his hands on the desk. His knuckles are the knuckles of someone who played the game before coaching it—big, crooked, and carrying the history of a career. “Do you want to tell me anything?”
There it is.
The question is shaped like an offer.
I could. I could tell him everything right now and remove the slow pressure of this particular secret.
If I’m honest, part of me wants to, because I’m not built for pretense and never have been.
I play my position openly, say what I think about opposing lineups, and two years ago, I told my pitching coach to his face that his grip-adjustment advice was wrong.
But telling Bishop now, in this office, with Ava’s photograph three feet from his right hand and Lena’s photo sitting in my phone like a grenade, is not the same as being honest. It’s being reckless. And I promised Ava we’d talk first.
“The blogs ran a photo of me leaving Ink District,” I say. “I’ve been there a few times.”
“For a tattoo.”
“Yes.”
“Multiple late-night visits for a tattoo.”
“The work is detailed. Multiple sessions.”
He holds my gaze. Bishop has the eyes of someone who has heard every version of every story and filed them all for future reference. “How much of it is done?”
“Most of it.”
“So, you’re nearly finished with your reasons for being there.”
The question is surgical. He’s not asking about ink.
“The work’s good,” I say. “I’ll probably go back.”
A silence develops between us that has a structural quality to it, like load-bearing quiet. He’s waiting for me to fill it. I don’t.
“The owner,” he says finally. Choosing the word with care, the way you choose a pitch for a particular batter. Not Ava. Not my daughter. The professional distance of the owner.
“Ava Bishop,” I say, because I’m not going to pretend I don’t know who she is when we both know I know. “Yes.”
“You’ve met her.”
“The first time I went in, she turned me away. Studio policy, no athletes.”
“She’s smart,” he says, and the two words carry the weight of a man who raised the person he’s describing.
“She is.”
“What changed?”
“She made an exception.”
“For the tattoo.”
“For the tattoo,” I confirm.
Another silence. Not conversational this time, the kind that precedes something.
Bishop stands. He moves to the whiteboard, studies the rotation schedule for a moment as though something on it requires attention, then turns back around.
It’s the movement of a man who needs a second before he says the thing he’s decided to say, which for Bishop is unusual enough to be notable. He doesn’t often need seconds.
“Reece…” He uses my first name about three times a season. Twice during contract conversations and once when Martinez blew his knee in September, and we all thought it was worse than it was. “You’re the best pitcher on this staff. Possibly the best I’ve coached.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not complimenting you. I’m framing a conversation.”
“Understood.”
“You’re twenty-seven. Your ERA is in the top five across both leagues. Contract extension is imminent. You have a five-year window ahead of you, minimum, where you can be the best in the game if you make the right choices.” He pauses. “Do you understand what I mean by right choices?”
“I understand what you mean.”
“Then you understand that distractions at this point in your career aren’t inconveniences.
They’re risks.” His voice doesn’t change but stays at the same level, the same register.
Controlled, which is somehow worse than anger.
“I’ve watched this before. Not once. Dozens of times.
A player with everything ahead of him gets tangled up in something personal, something that seems manageable, and the management of it takes energy his game needed.
The numbers dip. The confidence wobbles.
The deal he was offered six months ago isn’t the deal on the table now. ”
“My numbers aren’t dipping.”
“Not yet.”
The two words land the way he intends them to.
He’s good at this.
“What are you asking me, Coach?”
He looks at me for a long moment. “Stay away from Ink District. Give the blogs nothing new to work with, let this cycle through the news, and come out the other side clean.” He picks up a pen, turns it once in his hand.
“The extension needs a clear run. I’m not the one offering it, but I am the one management consults.
You want to know what I tell them? I tell them you’re focused, professional, and the right investment. I want to keep telling them that.”
The room is very quiet.
I think about what Ava said in the studio the other night, her voice even, her hands not quite steady. ‘He’s not wrong about it, Reece. He’s seen it happen too many times to be wrong.’ She knows her father. She knew this conversation was coming before I did.