Chapter Eighteen
Ava
The first message arrives on a Tuesday.
A DM to the studio’s Instagram account, from a handle I don’t recognize with a blue checkmark and four hundred thousand followers.
Hi Ava!
I’m a producer with SportsCenter Digital, and we’d love to chat about your connection to the Wildcats organization. No pressure, totally informal!
I read it twice. Then I archive it without responding.
The second arrives on Wednesday morning, to my personal email via the contact form on the studio website. A freelance journalist with a very respectful tone. Lots of words like ‘perspective, your side of the story, and background conversation only.’ I close the tab.
By Thursday, there are four more. Two on Instagram, one from a podcast I’ve never heard of, one from a blog that covers sports adjacent lifestyle content, which is apparently a category that exists.
The podcast one is almost impressive in its audacity.
They want me on for a full episode. An hour of airtime to talk about what it feels like to be, and I am quoting directly here, ‘The woman at the center of the Reece Steele situation.’
I delete that one so fast my thumb barely registers the motion.
Zoe watches me from the front desk with the careful expression of someone sitting on seventeen opinions she has decided, for once, to keep to herself.
“Say it,” I tell her, not looking up from the sketch I’m working on.
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re thinking loudly.”
“I think loudly all the time. You usually ignore it.” She spins her pen between two fingers. “You know they’re going to keep asking.”
“Then they’re going to keep not getting an answer.”
“Ava.”
“My name isn’t news, Zoe. My studio isn’t a story.
And my personal life is not content.” I press the pencil harder into the page, refining the line I’m working on, the inner curve of a wing, a commission for a client I genuinely love, a memorial piece for her grandmother.
I will not let the circus outside this building touch something this important.
“I’m not engaging. Not now, not next week, not ever. End of conversation.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then, with the specific diplomacy of someone choosing their battles, “The wing looks incredible.”
“Thank you.”
“The feather detail on the left side, especially.”
“Don’t oversell it.”
“I’m genuinely complimenting your work.”
“I know. It still sounds like you’re trying to soften me up.”
“Maybe I am. Maybe I also genuinely think you’re brilliant, and watching you get poked at by people who don’t know you makes me want to commit crimes.” She pauses. “Those two things can coexist.”
Something in my chest loosens. I set the pencil down and look at her properly.
She’s wearing her hair in a new braid pattern today.
It’s intricate, geometric, and spectacular, as everything Zoe does is when she bothers to try.
She also looks genuinely worried, which she covers with her usual performance of absolute confidence in all situations.
“I’m fine,” I tell her.
“You’ve reorganized the ink bottles four times this week.”
“I have a system.”
“The system keeps changing.”
“The system is evolving.”
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.
“You have a client at three,” I tell her.
She blinks. “It’s barely two.”
“Take a long lunch.”
A beat. Then she grabs her bag from under the desk with a speed suggesting she has been quietly rehearsing for this moment and didn’t want to be caught unprepared. “I’ll be at the café. Text me when…” She catches my expression. “I’ll just be at the café.”
The door chimes behind her.
The studio goes quiet.
Reece doesn’t move from the doorway. He stays exactly where he stopped, hands loose at his sides, and looks at me with the particular stillness he carries when he’s made a decision he’s not backing away from.
I stay at my station.
“You should be at the game,” I say.
“Yeah, I should be.”
“Which means tomorrow I’ll catch hell from the coach, the pitching coach, and probably the owner.” He shrugs. “You’re worth it.”
For a second, I forget what I was doing, then I look back at the screen.
“You should have called.”
“You wouldn’t have picked up.”
“I would have.”
“Would you?”
A pause long enough to be honest. “Possibly not.”
“Then showing up was the right call.” He glances around the studio at the designs on the walls, my station, the commission work on the screen, the stacked folders, and the sign above my desk that reads, ‘Your bad decisions are my rent money.’ His face does something complicated. “You’re working.”
“I’m always working.”
“The memorial piece?”
He remembers. Of course, he remembers. He remembers everything I tell him in the quiet spaces between everything else, filed and kept, pulled back out with a precision that has always unnerved me in the best possible way.
“The wing is nearly ready to transfer,” I say.
“Can I see it?”
I hesitate for exactly half a second, then I turn the screen toward him.
He crosses the studio slowly, making no sudden movements, giving me time to change my mind about every step he takes. He stops at the edge of my station and looks at the screen.
The silence stretches.
“Ava.” His voice comes out differently from anything I’ve heard from him before. Quieter. Stripped of every layer of Reece Steele, pitcher, persona, golden boy. “This is extraordinary.”
“It’s not done.”