Chapter Twenty-One
Ava
It’s Sunday morning, I’m standing at my kitchen counter with coffee going cold beside me, and my phone is already sweaty in my hand when I send my dad a text message.
Me: Dinner tonight? My place. Six o’clock.
Dad responds in forty seconds flat.
Dad: I’ll bring dessert.
I stare at the message for a long moment, then set my phone face down on the counter and press both palms flat against the tile. The cool of it steadies me somewhat. Not entirely, but somewhat.
The second text takes longer to write.
Me: I need you to come at six. Not five-thirty, not six-fifteen. Six.
Reece: Why the very specific window?
Me: Because I need thirty minutes not to have a breakdown before you arrive.
Reece: Ava.
Me: Come at six. Park around the corner. And please, for the love of everything good, don’t be late.
Reece: I’m never late.
Me: You told me that last time and showed up twelve minutes early.
Reece: I was eager.
Me: Tonight, be eager on time.
There’s a pause, and I imagine him reading the message and him understanding exactly what I’m not saying outright because he’s always been good at reading the things I leave between the lines.
Reece: Is this what I think it is?
Me: Yes.
Another pause. Longer.
Reece: I’ll be there at six. Not five fifty-eight. Six.
Me: Thank you.
Reece: Ava?
Me: Yeah?
Reece: Breathe.
I laugh, and it comes out slightly fractured, but it’s real. I pick up my coffee, take a long sip of something gone lukewarm, and stare out the window at a Sunday that looks entirely normal and feels anything but.
Then I go buy groceries for three.
By five fifteen, the apartment smells like roasted garlic and something that might generously be described as confidence.
I made pasta. My grandmother’s recipe, the one that requires three separate pots and approximately forty-five minutes of stirring. It’s the kind of meal I cook when I need my hands busy and my brain occupied, and tonight both of those things are critically necessary.
The table is set. The wine is breathing on the counter. I’ve changed my outfit twice, settled on dark jeans and a soft green top, and told myself I’m not nervous approximately seventeen times, none of which have been convincing.
At five fifty-eight, my buzzer goes.
I check the time. Then I check it again.
“You said six,” I say into the intercom.
“I was eager,” Reece says through the static.
“Reece.”
“I’m buzzing in from the corner of the building. I’m not actually outside your door. I just wanted to tell you I was here.” A pause. “Is that better or worse?”
I press the button to let him up because arguing through an intercom at five fifty-eight on the most nerve-racking evening of my recent life is not how I want to spend the next two minutes.
Reece knocks softly before I open the door. He’s holding a bottle of red wine and wearing dark jeans and a navy shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and he looks so steady and certain that something in my chest loosens slightly on the spot.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi, yourself.”
He steps inside, pressing a kiss to my temple as he passes me into the kitchen. “It smells incredible in here.”
“Grandmother’s recipe.”
“You cooked a grandmother recipe?” He sets the wine on the counter beside the one already open. “I’m honored.”
“Don’t be honored yet. Wait until he leaves.”
He turns, studying my face with the focused attention I’ve come to know means he’s reading more than I’m saying. “How are you doing?”
“Somewhere between fine and terrible.”
“That’s honest.”
“I promised myself I’d stop lying about it.” I move to check the pasta. “He texted that he was leaving his apartment at five forty, which means he’ll be here right around six. You have four minutes.”
“What do you want me to do for four minutes?”
I point at the wine. “Open that one too. We’re going to need it.”
He’s still smiling when he takes the bottle and the corkscrew, and the domesticity of him standing in my kitchen uncorking wine, easy and unhurried, does something complicated and warm to the anxiety currently occupying the center of my chest.
“Reece,” I say.
“Mm…”
“Whatever happens tonight—”
“It’ll be okay.”
“You don’t know…”
“It’ll be okay,” he repeats, and the certainty in it isn’t arrogance. It never is with him. It’s something quieter. Something earned. He sets the open bottle down and turns to face me across the counter. “Whatever he says. Whatever his reaction is in the first five minutes. It’ll be okay.”
I want to argue. I’m very good at arguing. Instead, I nod because the buzzer goes off before I can say anything else. My stomach drops somewhere below the floorboards, and Reece gives me a look that is equal parts steady, warm, and deeply aware of what this moment costs me.
“Go let him in,” he says. “I’ll stay in here.”
“No.” I straighten. “Stay visible. I’m done hiding.”
Something moves across his face. He picks up both wine glasses, passes one to me, and leans against the counter as if he lives here. As if this is exactly where he’s supposed to be.
The buzzer sounds again.
I go.
My father fills a doorway the way very few people do.
Not just the physical presence of him, broad-shouldered, silver at the temples, carrying the particular authority of someone who has spent thirty years making twenty-year-olds do what he tells them.
It’s the whole effect. The way his eyes move when he enters a space, cataloging and assessing, arriving at conclusions before he’s taken his coat off.
He arrives at this one in approximately four seconds.
He sees Reece standing in my kitchen, wine glass in hand, entirely at ease, and the silence that follows is the specific kind I remember from childhood, the kind that means my father is deciding how to handle something.
“Coach Bishop.” Reece’s voice is level. Respectful. Not a trace of the apology that would ring false, and none of the aggression that would make things worse. “Can I pour you a glass?”
Dad looks at me.
I hold his gaze. “Come in, Dad.”
He does. He sets the bakery box he’s carrying on my table.
He looks at Reece, then he looks at me, and I watch him process the evidence in front of him—the three place settings, the two bottles of wine, the easy familiarity in the way Reece moves around my kitchen, the fact I am not flinching, apologizing, or doing any of the things I might have done in the past.
“How long,” Dad says. Not a question, it’s a calculation.
“Long enough,” I tell him.
“Since before or after the game last week?”
“Before.”
“How long before?”
“Dad.”
“Ava.” His voice is not angry. It’s something more complicated than anger, the specific register he uses when he’s confronting something he has suspected but hasn’t been ready to confirm. “How long?”
“Since the beginning of the season.”
The silence returns. Reece stays still, holding the wine glass, not filling the quiet and not shrinking from it either. He told me once that the best thing he learned from years of pitching was how to wait. How to hold the moment without rushing it.
He’s doing it now.
“You pitched the game of your life last Thursday,” my father says, and his eyes move to Reece with the particular dissecting focus that has undone better men than most. “You threw a complete game shutout in a playoff situation. Your command was flawless.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve been watching you since you came up through the minors. I’ve watched you pitch angry, pitch distracted, pitch hungover once…” he raises an eyebrow, “… don’t think I didn’t know, and pitch with a shoulder that should have been on ice.” He pauses. “Last Thursday was different.”
Reece doesn’t answer immediately. Then, “Yeah, it was.”
“Because of my daughter.”
“Because of a lot of things.” Reece sets down his glass.
“Because I’ve spent three years pitching for everyone else’s expectations, and somewhere this season I remembered why I loved it.
Because I stopped running from the things that matter and started throwing toward them.
” He looks at me briefly, then back to my father.
“Ava is a part of that. She’s a big part of it, but she’s not the whole story, and I won’t reduce her to a reason my numbers went up. ”
My father is quiet.
Outside, a car passes. The city does what the city does, enormous and indifferent, while the three of us stand in my small kitchen with the sauce simmering on the stove.
“You should have told me,” Dad says finally, and he’s looking at me now.
“I know.”
“The hiding…”
“I know, Dad.”
“It’s not what I taught you.”
“No.” I meet his eyes. “It’s what I taught myself. Because I was scared of exactly this conversation.” I set down my glass. “I’m not scared of it anymore.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks at Reece. Then he does the thing I have seen him do at the end of difficult meetings, the slight exhale, the almost imperceptible shift in the set of his shoulders, the decision made.
He picks up the wine glass Reece poured for him from the counter.
“If you hurt her…” he says to Reece, conversationally, as though discussing batting averages, “… I will make the remainder of your contract the most educational experience of your professional life.”
“Understood,” Reece says.
“And you…” Dad turns to me, “… stop making things harder than they need to be. You always did.”
“Genetics,” I tell him.
Something shifts in his face. It’s not a smile, not fully. It’s the reluctant softening of a man who has already arrived at an answer and is adjusting the rest of himself to match it.
He raises his glass.
“The pasta had better be worth it,” he says.
“It always is,” I tell him.
We eat.
A week later, the Wildcats are home.
I find a seat in section 214, the same box where I sat the first time, the night I told myself I was there for the fresh air and definitely not for a particular pitcher. The stadium hums at a frequency I’ve spent a year pretending to be immune to and have long since given up resisting.