Chapter Thirteen #2
I think about the photograph on Lena’s burner number, the extension Derek spent ninety seconds telling me was within reach, the management voicemail I deleted, and the way the word ‘low profile’ sat in my stomach like something indigestible.
I think about Ava on my tailgate at midnight, eating tacos, saying ‘the other shoe was going to drop,’ Ava in her studio with her machine humming, and the city quiet outside, and Ava’s handwriting in the margin of a design sketch I wasn’t supposed to see with a small arrow pointing to nothing, labeled ‘here.’
Bishop is watching me the way he watches batters working through counts—patient, still, and reading the micro-movements.
I am a man who does not lie to his coaches. I’ve never had cause to because I’ve never had anything worth hiding.
I keep my face even and my voice steady and say. “I appreciate the advice.”
He nods once. Accepts this. Files it. Probably, in the same place, he files all the other versions of all the other stories he’s heard in thirty years of managing athletes.
“Drink more water during the afternoon session,” he says, which is his way of ending things. “You’re losing it faster in the heat.”
“Yes, sir.”
I leave.
The corridor back to the field takes approximately forty-five seconds to walk. I know because I count my steps without meaning to, the way you count things when your brain needs somewhere to put itself while the more important machinery runs underneath.
Forty-five seconds is enough time to understand several things simultaneously.
The first is Bishop doesn’t know. Not definitively.
He suspects, he’s too sharp not to suspect, but he doesn’t have confirmation, and a man with confirmation doesn’t ask the questions he asked.
He asks different ones. Bishop asked the questions of someone building a case with incomplete evidence, which means Lena’s photograph hasn’t been posted, she’s still holding it, and the timeline is still mine to work with.
The second is that he wasn’t cruel in there.
He wasn’t acting out of obstruction or ego.
He genuinely believes what he said. He’s watched careers erode under the specific pressure he’s describing.
His concern for my contract and his concern for Ava are the same concern expressed from the same source, a man who has seen too many things go wrong from exactly this starting position.
The third, which settles over me with the same flat certainty as the other two…
It doesn’t change anything.
The afternoon session runs until four. I throw another bullpen, this one overseen by our pitching coach with Bishop watching from the dugout rail. I’m aware of his presence in a peripheral way I’m aware of everything during a session, registered, noted, and not dwelled on.
My command is precise. My spin rate, I’ll find out later from the analytics board, is the highest it’s been in six weeks. I hit seventeen consecutive targets, which is a bullpen record for me in a single session.
Mack catches everything without comment, which is his version of loud approval.
Afterward, in the showers, Martinez sidles up with the expression of a man who considers himself a credible source of information. “Bishop pulled you in this morning.”
“He did.”
“And?”
“We discussed hydration.”
Martinez squints. “You discussed—”
“Among other things.”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Senses, possibly, that he’s not getting anything useful from this particular conversation and moves on.
Mack finds me at my locker ten minutes later. He sits down, works on his laces, and doesn’t say anything for a while.
“You’re not going to stop seeing her,” he says finally, and it’s not a question.
“No.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Nothing useful.”
He nods, processing this. “He’s going to figure it out.”
“He’s already most of the way there.”
“And when he fully gets there?”
“I’ll deal with it.” I pull my shirt over my head. “In the meantime, I need to have a conversation with Ava that I should have had two hours ago and didn’t because I was in a session.”
“Is she going to take it well?”
“She’s going to take it realistically, which is different from well, but I’ll work with it.”
“Reece.” Mack glances at me sideways. “Bishop’s not the only complication. Management, Lena, the blogs, you’ve got a full field of problems right now.”
“I’ve pitched with the bases loaded before.”
“This isn’t baseball.”
“Every problem is baseball if you think about it long enough.”
“That…” he says, with the specific exasperation of someone who has been friends with me for three years, “… is the most Reece Steele answer to a human problem I’ve ever heard.”
From my car, I call Ava.
Three rings before she picks up, which is one ring longer than usual. I file this without comment.
“Hi,” she says carefully.
“Hi, yourself.” I pull out of the players’ lot and head toward the city. “Can I come over?”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“We agreed.”
“I know.”
“Then let me come over.”
“Reece…” A pause. “You talked to my father.”
Not a question. She knows him well enough to read the shape of what I’m not saying.
“He had some thoughts about my visits to Ink District,” I say. “Expressed them professionally and without any specific accusations.”
“Which means he knows.”
“Which means he suspects and chose to allow me to confirm or deny.”
“And you—”
“Said nothing useful and got back to work.”
Silence on the line. I can hear her breathing, the faint muted sounds of her apartment, the city, and music playing low. I picture her string lights on, casting everything in gold.
“You didn’t tell him,” she says.
“No.”
“But you’re not going to stay away.”
“No.”
Another silence, longer this time. “He’s going to figure it out, Reece. He will. And when he does—”
“When he does, we’ll handle it together.
Same answer as last time.” I ease through a yellow light.
“But I don’t want to have this conversation over the phone.
I want to have it with you in the same room so I can see your face, and you can’t retreat into your worst-case scenarios without me being there to argue with each one. ”
She makes the small sound she makes when she’s fighting a smile. “You’re very annoying.”
“You’ve mentioned it.”
“My dad spoke to you today, and your response is to drive directly toward the source of the problem.”
“I’m a pitcher, Ava. My entire job is to put the ball exactly where everyone expects me not to.”
The smile wins. I hear it before she says anything, the quality of the exhale, the slight shift in the sound of her voice. “Fine. Come over. There’s no food.”
“I’ll pick something up.”
“Nothing with garlic. I have a seven a.m. client.”
“Thai?”
“Thai.”
“Twenty minutes,” I say.
“Be careful coming in.”
“When am I not careful?”
“Every single time,” she says and hangs up.
I stop at the Thai place two blocks from her apartment, order the Pad See Ew and something for myself, and sit in the car for sixty seconds while I wait.
Bishop’s voice runs through my head again. ‘Stay away from Ink District.’ Steady and certain, the voice of someone whose advice is almost always correct, whose instincts about athletes, pressure, and the specific ways personal lives collapse into professional ones are built on decades of evidence.
He’s not wrong.
He’s also not going to win this one.
I pick up the food, park two streets over, and take the long way around to her building. The city hums around me, indifferent and enormous, and somewhere across town, my coach is probably still in his office, rotating his pen, and adding up variables.
I take the stairs two at a time.
Ava opens the door before I knock, which means she heard me coming, which means she was listening for me, which means I’m smiling before I even cross the threshold.
“The food better be hot,” she says.
“The food is perfect.” I step inside, and she closes the door behind me, and the weight of the day, the blogs, the call, the office, the forty-five seconds of corridor, and everything decided in it, settles into something manageable.
“Tell me everything,” she says.
So I do.