Chapter 17
Audrey
The crack of the bat reaches me a half-second after I see the swing, and the whole row in front of me surges to its feet before the ball has finished climbing.
I stay seated.
I check my phone instead. The screen is clear. No missed call, no text from Melinda, no small disaster requiring a mother. Just the time and a battery I keep checking like it has anything new to tell me.
I dropped the kids off two hours ago. By the time I walked up to Melinda's door, Sophie had already taken her shoes off, and Eli was halfway into the toy basket.
We'll be fine, Melinda said, with Thomas's eyes and her own steadiness.
I believed her and drove away before either of us could make it mean more than it was.
Then I went home. Stood in front of my closet for ten minutes. I grabbed my sunglasses, a bag, and a hat and got on the highway, driving an hour into the city, toward a stadium I've only ever seen as a blur passing my window.
I tug the brim of my hat lower.
The man two seats down is screaming something at the field with his entire body. A girl in front of me is filming the crowd, panning slowly, and I lift my drink so the cup covers half my face until she swings the phone the other way.
This is his life.
I keep arriving at it, the same thought.
My mind keeps snagging on the scale of this place.
The noise, the lights coming up against a sky that hasn't fully let go of the sun, thousands of people who do this on a Tuesday.
The grass looks too green to be real, cut into stripes, and the dirt of the infield is raked into something close to art.
And somewhere down there in all of it is a man who climbed down a trellis in a stripper-cop costume.
I find him by the name across his back.
CALLOWAY, in white block letters, and the second I read it I look away like I've been caught, even though no one in this entire stadium has any idea that I know that name the way I do now. The smell of his skin. The sound of his voice low against my ear.
Number eleven. That's how I'll track him.
But I notice other things too.
The way he sets his feet between pitches, that little rock back onto his heels.
The way he talks to another player with his glove up over his mouth so no one can read it.
He moves like the field belongs to him in a way that has nothing to do with arrogance, and I'm embarrassed by how long I can watch him do nothing at all.
The catcher is easier to follow.
The catcher stays in the same spot. He stays there, steady and contained, instead of disappearing somewhere I'd have to track him.
I know it's Declan from the way he moves before I'm sure of the build. Careful. Contained. He pulls his mask off between innings, and I drop my eyes to my lap until the inning starts again.
Last night I sat across a small table from that man. I let him drive me home and let him believe it was too soon.
If he turns around. If he scans the seats looking for someone in the crowd. If he finds me here at all.
He'll think I came for him.
My hands tighten on the strap of my bag.
I make myself breathe, shrinking into a smaller shape in the seat.
By the seventh inning, the sun has gone behind the mountains, and the lake behind the stadium wall has gone from gold to pewter to nearly black. The lights have taken over completely, and the field glows like something from another world, even through my sunglasses.
He's been good tonight.
I don't know enough about baseball to know how good, but I know the sound the crowd makes when he does something, and they've made it three times.
A dive in the fourth that left dirt all up one side of him.
A throw that made the crowd surge before I even understood what happened.
In the fifth inning, he came up to bat, and I caught myself holding my breath with everyone else, watching him stay there through pitch after pitch until he finally hit one hard enough to send the whole stadium to its feet.
Number eight catches my attention mostly because I recognize him now. Nate. Even from up here I can tell when it's him beside Asher, the easy familiarity of them, the way they knock gloves and say something to each other that gets half a grin out of Asher before they split apart again.
Nate looks up toward the stands while the players reset, scanning somewhere behind the dugout, and both times I go still and let his eyes pass over me like I'm furniture.
Because Nate has sat at my kitchen table.
He's carried Eli to bed when Eli fell asleep on the couch.
Nate knows what I looked like when everything in my life fell apart.
He doesn't see me.
Then I see Asher, stepping off the dirt and looking up into the stands.
Not for me.
He doesn't know I'm here. His eyes pass over my section and keep going.
He does it again two pitches later. Slower this time. Sweeping.
I sit on my hands.
It would take one wave. One stupid, reckless lift of my arm and he'd find me. I press my palms flat against the seat and stop myself.
I don't want to make him lose his focus.
The coach comes to the top step of the dugout and says something short. Asher nods once, resets, and the looking stops.
The crowd starts reacting before I understand why.
Then words flash across the board.
CELEbrITY LOOKALIKES.
The camera starts picking people out of the crowd, stopping on an older man with silver hair and aviators.
People around me start yelling the name of some action movie star I can't place fast enough.
The man takes off the aviators and wriggles his eyebrows, and the camera shakes because whoever's running it is laughing too.
Then a heavyset guy with a mustache appears on screen, and half the stadium laughs, quoting a line from an insurance commercial. That one's pretty good. All the guy needs is the polo shirt.
The camera swings again.
It's a blonde woman with huge sunglasses.
The scream that cuts through the noise reaches me before the caption even appears.
"EEEEEE, IT'S TAYLOR!"
I know that scream.
Nora.
My head snaps left so fast my neck hurts.
There she is, several sections over and lower down, out of her seat with both hands in the air like she's trying to get the lady's attention from the jumbotron. Beside her is a tall blonde woman laughing hard enough to fold forward for a second before she pulls Nora back down into her seat.
Felicity.
Even from this distance, I can see the resemblance to Asher. The same charisma. The same easy brightness when she laughs.
The blonde woman with sunglasses waves her hand, shaking her head no. The screen goes back to the game. And just when I think I'm in the clear, Nora turns around, searching for the Taylor Smith lookalike.
My heart slams hard enough that I press a hand to my chest.
I sink lower into my seat.
What would I even say to her if she saw me?
No excuse she would believe.
Maybe Declan.
But Nora would question why I didn't let her know so we could go together.
No.
I pull the hat so low that the brim touches the top of my sunglasses.
I angle my body away from her section, and I don't move for the rest of the inning except to breathe.
I watch the man I'm not supposed to know jog back across the field while the only family I have sits fifteen rows away with no idea I'm here.
The last out doesn't come soon enough.
The final score settles at 6–3, and I'm out of my seat before the noise has fully peaked.
The crowd starts up the steps in a slow river. I let it carry me, hat down, bag against my chest, until I'm out in the concourse where the light is too strong, and the air smells like fryer oil and spilled beer. People flow past me toward the parking structures.
I walk for a while, away from Nora, until I find a quiet pocket near a shuttered concessions stand and pull out my phone.
I'm here. Is there somewhere we can meet that isn't out in the open?
The reply is fast.
YOU’RE HERE??
Then:
Are you serious right now?
I smile as I type back.
Somewhere private. Please. I don't want Nora or Nate to see me.
Three dots move. The screen goes black before I get the next message.
Service corridor off section 126. George is usually hanging around down there after games. Tell him you're with me. If he gives you trouble, tell him I owe him peach rings.
I find the section and show my screen to George.
Presumably. He chuckles and points me down a ramp, away from the people, and at the bottom the light changes.
Concrete, cooler air, the hum of something mechanical overhead.
The main tunnel runs long and gray ahead of me, and off the side of it there's a narrower corridor—dim, stacked with equipment cases.
Past all of it, at the open mouth where the tunnel meets the field, the stadium lights blaze down white onto empty green.
I tuck myself into the narrow corridor and wait in the shadows.
Safe enough now to take off the hat and ?sunglasses.
He comes through a set of double doors, still wearing half his uniform. Jersey off, in an undershirt and his baseball pants, hair wrecked, a streak of dirt still drying along his jaw.
He stops when he sees me.
For a second he just looks at me, and his whole face softens into something so unguarded it almost feels too private to witness.
"Doll face."
Then he's moving into the shadows with me, out of the light.
One hand finds my waist while the rest of him presses me into the tunnel wall.
The other hand comes up and a single knuckle tips my chin until I'm looking at him.
He holds me there for a breath, two, his eyes moving over my face like he's checking I'm real.
Then he kisses me.