Chapter 13 #2
him saying all the right things. She quietly longed for this version of life to become reality.
“How’d you get into baseball, Gabe?” her father asked as the waitstaff began clearing plates for dessert.
Emmy tensed again, nervous about skirting the dark-edged topic. Gabe felt it and gently smoothed his thumb over her hand in
small circles.
“I pitched in college,” he said. “But I also majored in math and went to grad school to get a master’s in statistics, so here
I am. Now I love the strategy of it all. The way it’s one giant formula.” He flashed them his million-dollar smile, and Emmy
silently thanked him for leaving out the part about his career-ending injury.
“Ah, I thought I recognized an ex-player,” Frank said. “You’ve definitely got the reach.” He lifted his hand as if to demonstrate
how tall Gabe was. “Have you ever considered coaching?”
“Actually, I’d love to get back on the field,” Gabe said. Emmy turned to him in surprise. “Not as a player, of course. But
on the training staff. It’s always been a bit of a dream.”
Emmy squeezed his hand at the small ache in his voice. She wasn’t sure her parents could hear it, but she did. She knew what
he ached over.
Their conversation then turned to the wedding and tomorrow’s schedule. It would be a full day of preparation and celebration. It had been so long coming, Emmy was both thrilled for it to finally happen and eager for it to be over with.
As she sipped the final drops of her final glass of wine of the night, she caught sight of her sister radiating joy across
the terrace. Piper laughed with her head tilted back, dark hair cascading over her shoulders and shining in the candle- and
moonlight. She wore a white jumpsuit and a glittering wreath necklace that looked like icicles dripping from her throat. Another
Carmichael family heirloom, certainly. The night had, miraculously, gone off without a hitch. Sure, they were crammed into
a smaller space than planned, but that made everything all the more intimate.
Her sister was happy; her parents were happy; she was happy. The moon was full, and Gabe Olson was stifling a yawn beside
her and looking ready for sleep.
“Bedtime?” Emmy asked.
“It was a long day,” he said, and wiped the tiny tear that had pinched out of his eye.
“Well, tomorrow is going to be even longer.”
“Maybe for you. I’m just a plus one freeloader.”
“I believe you made a fishing date with my dad, and you can’t break a promise to Frank Jameson.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Based on the honest glint in his eye, she could tell he was serious.
She smiled at him and then nudged his knee. “Come on. I think we are safe to make an exit right now.”
They slipped away from the party without any fuss and headed for the shuttle stop.
As they whizzed through the grounds in a golf cart, Emmy grew increasingly aware of Gabe’s presence beside her.
She’d been aware of it all day. And if she was completely honest, she was always aware of it.
In any space they shared, whether it be an office, a hotel room, a dinner table, a zippy little golf cart, he was like an anchor pulling her in.
A sun around which she orbited. She’d never realized how aware of him she was until she’d started paying attention.
When the shuttle deposited them outside their building, a breeze blew through the archway leading to the beach like a hand
beckoning them. The salty air curled over Emmy’s face and shoulders, fresh and inviting, and made her want to stay in the
open a while longer before she was back someplace where Gabe’s presence and her thoughts over what to do with it would overwhelm
her.
“Want to go for a walk?” she asked, and nodded toward the path leading to the beach.
“Sure,” he said with a nod.
They passed through the building and out into the dark on the other side. Except for the tiny ground lights lining the path
every ten feet or so, the only light came from a few balconies glowing above them, the villas dotting the distance, and the
moon on the water. They walked in silence for a while, and Emmy let the rush of the waves soothe her nervous thoughts. They’d
been inching closer and closer all day, in many senses, and she wasn’t sure how close they might continue to get.
“You don’t actually have to hang out with my dad, you know,” she said when they stepped off the paved path and into the sand.
The beach was empty and bleached black and white by moonlight.
“Of course I do. I want to.”
She looked over at him and felt a warm smile spread across her face. “Well, be careful. He might try to adopt you.”
Gabe snorted a laugh. “Frank and Vera Jameson seem like pretty cool parents, so I might take him up on the offer.”
“Back off, pal. They’re mine.” She playfully nudged him with her elbow.
He laughed again and stumbled a step sideways in the sand.
Emmy thought back to their conversation with Henry that morning in the lobby. Well, his conversation with Henry that she had to forcibly insert herself into because they wouldn’t even pause for a breath. “What’s your mom’s name?”
“Rose,” he said with a small smile.
“And your dad?”
“John.”
When he didn’t say anything else, she wondered if he was uncomfortable talking about them. “What are they like?” she asked,
somehow knowing he’d open up to her, even if that was the case.
He softly smiled again, but it looked almost sad. “They’re the best. My parents did everything for me. They paid for every
baseball camp and traveling team when I was a kid. They came to every game.” He huffed and swiped his hand through his hair.
“They gave me the best shot, and I crashed and burned—literally.” He squeezed his shoulder again and shook his head.
Emmy stopped walking and turned to him. “I don’t think that’s fair to say. You’ve done pretty well otherwise. And besides,
if you’d kept pitching, you’d be old by baseball standards now. Maybe even staring down retirement. I mean, sure, you’d probably
be sitting on an obscene mountain of money with a bunch of trophies and rings, but your glory days would be behind you. I
think you’ve got a lot of glory left in other ways, Gabe Olson.” She poked him in his uninjured arm and smiled.
He looked at her for a few beats, considering, and then softly smiled back. “Thank you.”
“It’s the truth,” she said, and kept walking. He followed her for a few silent paces. The waves invisibly crashed off to their
right; trees rustled to the left. “What you said to my parents at dinner, is that true? I didn’t know you wanted to be on
the training staff.”
He shrugged. “It’s a long shot and will probably never happen, but it’s kind of a dream. If I can’t be on the field, it’s as close as I can get.”
Emmy considered it with a tilt of her head. “Well, I think you’d be a great coach. And you would be traveling with the team.”
“Yes. And doing early workouts and ice baths and weight training—for them, not me.” He said it like it thrilled him.
“You sound way too excited about all that.”
“It is exciting.”
“Sure, if you like your limbs falling off by your late twenties.”
“With the right training, they won’t.”
“Whatever you say, Coach.”
They walked a few more paces without talking. The silence between them grew increasingly comfortable.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” Gabe eventually said.
“What?”
“All the times we overlapped without even noticing it.”
Emmy glanced sideways at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean all the times we were texting each other and didn’t catch on. Like that night we were out with Torres and Ishida and
complaining about being at a work thing when we’d rather be home and we were with each other at the work thing.”
An awkward, embarrassed laugh popped from Emmy’s throat. “Goes to show what kind of company we are, I guess.”
“And then the next day when I brought you breakfast, and you texted me you were recovering from your hangover with spicy food
and reality TV when I’d literally just brought you spicy food and left you watching reality TV.”
“Yeah, that was pretty bad. And that day early on when we both told each other we got good news at work, and we’d come from
learning about the promotion minutes before.”
“I think we were even in the same room for that one.”
“And when you told me you were helping with a family thing, and then I ran into you helping with your cousin’s boat the next
week.”
“Also painfully obvious.”
“And when you told me about your parents’ dream for your future and then showed me your scar days later. I definitely didn’t
put two and two together.”
Their laughter fell to a simmer, and Emmy regretted broaching the serious topic. “Sorry, that one’s not as funny as the others.”
Gabe paused walking and reached for Emmy’s arm. They’d stopped on the sand a few feet from the path’s edge. The powder had
cooled to soft white dust in the dark. She turned to him and could see in his eyes he was about to walk through the door she’d
opened.
“Emmy, I’m really sorry about your brother. I didn’t know what to say when you first told me in your apartment that day, and
I obviously hadn’t put two and two together to know that was the family tragedy you’d texted about. I should have realized
it’s a sensitive subject for all of you and steered clear of it tonight.”
She gave him a sad half smile. “It’s okay. You don’t need to know what to say. I don’t even know what to say, and it’s been fifteen years.” She let out a big breath and gazed out at the water. The sea rolled
like an inky black blanket with a shimmering streak of moonlight. The sight of it, an endless expanse, and the feel of Gabe
beside her, his warmth, his steadiness, drew words from her mouth with a whole host of feelings she normally kept locked up.
A pair of silent, giant tears budded out of her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. “I do okay with it most of the time. It’s
just things like this—life events—that really hurt because he’s not here.” She turned to look at him and found a sincere crease