Chapter Fifteen
Ava
The decision comes at four in the morning.
Not impulsively. Not in the hot, reactive way I’m afraid of, the way that would make it feel like Lena won something. I make it the way I make difficult design decisions, by sitting with all the information until the shape of the only workable answer becomes unavoidable.
I’m on my couch with my phone face down on the coffee table, the string lights are still on, and I go through it methodically.
The timeline of the last twelve hours. The blog post. The caption.
The word ‘favoritism’ sitting above a photograph of Reece leaving my studio, time-stamped, geotagged, given context by a sentence designed to raise a question no answer can fully neutralize.
The photo she had held, and deployed at the exact moment most likely to cause the most structural damage, not to me, not primarily, but to Reece. To the contract. To the clean narrative his career needs right now.
And I’m the mechanism. However involuntarily, however unfairly, I am the thing being used to apply pressure to a man who deserves none of this.
At 4:17 a.m., I pick up my phone and type.
Me: We need to talk. Can you come over at noon?
His response comes in under two minutes, which means he’s not sleeping either.
Reece: I’ll be there.
I put the phone down and watch the city lighten through my window, and I don’t let myself feel anything yet. Feeling comes after. First comes the doing.
He arrives at 11:58 a.m.
Of course he does.
I open the door, he looks at me, and I can see him reading my face, the stillness of it, the specific quality of my control, and the way I step back to let him in rather than toward him.
He clocks all of it in the time it takes to cross the threshold, and something in his expression prepares itself.
“Ava.”
“Sit down,” I say. “Please.”
He sits. I stay standing because I need the space to think clearly, and being within arm’s reach of him makes thinking clearly a considerably longer process.
“The posts are still running,” I say. “Three more outlets picked it up overnight. One of them has real reach. The comment sections are—” I stop, because the comment sections are not the point, and I will not let the comment sections be the point.
“My name is trending in local sports coverage. My studio is being described as a point of access. Me as a means to an end.”
“None of that is true.”
“I know it’s not true.” My voice comes out even.
“You know it’s not true. Everyone who has ever sat in my chair knows it’s not true.
None of that changes what it looks like from the outside.
” I fold my arms across my chest. “And what it looks like from the outside is what management sees. What your contract negotiators see. What your coach sees.”
He’s very still. Listening, not preparing a counterargument. This is one of the things about him I’ve come to rely on, and I can’t afford to rely on it today.
“I’ve been thinking about this for seven hours,” I say.
“And I keep coming back to the same place. You are on the verge of the biggest contract of your career. Your numbers are the best they’ve been in three seasons.
You have everything lined up, and the only thing standing between you and everything you’ve worked for is me.
The way I look in a caption. The narrative Lena has constructed around us.
” I hold his gaze. “I’m not willing to be that. ”
“Ava,” he says my name the way he says it when he needs me to slow down. “This isn’t something you caused.”
“Causation is beside the point. Impact isn’t.
” I move to the window, needing the distance.
“If you lose this contract because your coach is compromised, because management gets nervous, because the media runs a six-week cycle about favoritism and distraction, you will know I was in the middle of it. And I will know. And whatever this is between us won’t survive that knowledge, regardless of how we feel about each other right now. ”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know myself.” I turn back around. “I know what happens to me when I feel like I’ve cost someone something they can’t get back.
I watched my mother spend three years apologizing to my father for derailing a coaching opportunity he took elsewhere because of her.
I watched what that does to a relationship. I’m not doing it.”
He stands up and doesn’t come toward me. He reads the room well enough to know I need him to stay where he is, but he stands, the full height of him, and the steadiness of his expression makes the next part harder.
“We don’t do this yet,” he says. “The timing is wrong.”
“The timing is never going to be right. Lena will make sure of that.” My chest aches with the specific pressure of saying the right thing when every other part of me is pulling in the opposite direction.
“I need you to hear me, Reece. This isn’t me being afraid.
This isn’t the worst-case scenario thinking you’ve spent six weeks talking me out of.
This is me looking at a real situation with real stakes and making a choice that protects you, because you won’t protect yourself. ”
“I don’t need protecting.”
“You need your career. You need the contract. You need your coach’s trust, management’s confidence, and the next five years of baseball, which are going to be the best five years of your career.” The ache in my chest spreads. “And I need not to be the reason any of that goes wrong.”
He looks at me for a long time. I watch him work through it, the arguments, the counters, the thing he almost said last night in the amber light that still sits between us unspoken and enormous.
“I’m not accepting this,” he says. Quiet. Absolute.
“You don’t have to accept it. You just have to respect it.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Y-yes.” My voice breaks on the single syllable, very slightly, and I straighten my spine and breathe through it. “There is.”
He picks up his keys from the counter. He holds them for a moment without moving to the door, and I think he’s going to say the thing, the unsaid thing from last night, and I’m not sure I could hold my position if he does.
Instead, he says, “This isn’t over.”
“Reece…”
“Not a threat. Not a pitch.” He meets my eyes for the last time before he leaves, and the look on his face is the look I’ve been cataloging since the bleachers, the one that doesn’t perform, calculate, or manage.
“Just a fact. When this settles, I’m coming back.
And I need you not to have talked yourself out of me entirely by then. ”
He leaves.
I lock both locks. Stand in the silence. Wait for the decision to feel like the right one.
It feels like the worst one I’ve ever made.
The days that follow have a particular quality I don’t know what to do with.
The studio becomes my refuge, and the work becomes strategy.
I do the thing I’ve always done when the ground shifts, I put my head down and create because creating is the only activity that requires enough of my brain to silence the rest of it.
A full backpiece I’ve been building for eight months is complete.
I take on two new consultations. I redesign Zoe’s station layout when she asks me to, then redesign it again when the first version bothers me.
Zoe watches all of this with the quiet attention of someone who has pieced together more than she’s been told.
She doesn’t ask. I don’t offer. We operate in the same wordless arrangement we’ve had since I hired her, except now it has a different texture.
It’s softer, more careful. She starts leaving a fresh coffee on my station without being asked.
She handles walk-ins with greater autonomy, redirecting people before they reach me, allowing me uninterrupted sessions.
Small accommodations are offered without ceremony.
I appreciate them more than I know how to say.
The sports coverage cycles through the story in roughly four days, the way these things do, with the initial wave, then the secondary commentary, then the inevitable pivot to the next distraction.
My name drops out of the trending columns by Wednesday.
The blog posts remain indexed and findable, with the caption still sitting there if anyone searches hard enough, but the active noise subsides.
What doesn’t subside is quieter and harder to track.
I hear it from the periphery, the way you hear things when you’re adjacent to a world without being inside it.
Zoe mentions a client who brought up the Wildcats in passing.
The coffee shop near my apartment has a game on the television every afternoon.
The city doesn’t stop caring about baseball because I’ve decided to.
And baseball doesn’t stop happening because it’s inconvenient for me.
I hear about Reece’s performance not because I’m looking for it, but because it is impossible to be in this city in this season and not hear about Reece Steele.
The first game after is a home game. He gives up four runs in six innings, which by the standards of the rest of his season is the equivalent of a collapse.
I hear it from a client on Thursday morning, delivered without context or knowledge of its relevance to me, the same way someone might mention rain.
‘Did you see the Wildcats game? Steele had a rough one.’
I finish the shading on her shoulder and say nothing.
The second game is on the road. I don’t look it up. I find out anyway. Mack texts me, which I wasn’t expecting, a single message that reads,
Mack: He’s not okay. Just so you know.
There’s no accusation in it. No ask. Just information delivered plainly.
I stare at the message for a long time before putting my phone in my drawer and going back to work.
The third game I don’t hear about until my father calls.