Chapter 22 #2
Emmy slowly nodded, adding the newest addition to her list of bombshell facts redefining everything she thought she knew.
Gabe hadn’t gotten someone fired out of spite; it had been a morality move—and probably a difficult one to make as a young
intern. God , she’d been so wrong.
She shook herself and tried to focus. “Thanks, Alice. I won’t say anything. So, what does this mean? He’s been transferred
to a different department, and we’re free to be together?”
“Yep. Turned out there was an opening on the pitching staff, and with his experience and the promise of taking some training
courses, they were willing to give him a shot,” she said with a smile. “I mean, he’ll be starting at the bottom, doing the
grunt work, but he was willing to do anything. We just needed sign-off from Director Allen yesterday morning. Now he’ll be
traveling with the team, but so will you as senior analyst. Kind of worked out perfectly, wouldn’t you say?”
“Oh god, yes. Right,” Emmy said, suddenly remembering her promotion came with a significant change in lifestyle. “How soon
will that start?”
“For you? Next week,” Alice said. “For him?” She flipped her wrist to look at her watch. “In about an hour, if they haven’t already left for tonight’s game in LA.”
Emmy’s heart hammered. So much had changed in the past twenty-four hours. She had a new job, a new office. And the things
she’d said to Gabe? How would he ever forgive her? He hadn’t lied to her. He’d tried to fix the problem so she could have
everything she wanted.
And through it all, she still wanted him. She’d always wanted him.
The question now was would he still want her?
The urge to crunch into a ball and cry hit her hard, but Alice softly punched her shoulder and nodded toward the hall with
a smile. “Come on. Let’s get you into your new office.”
Emmy followed her down the hall, awash in a complicated cocktail of emotions. She was thrilled about the job—she’d gotten
everything she’d been working for. But her heart was aching over what she’d said to Gabe. She hadn’t even given him the chance
to explain before she jumped to the worst conclusions.
As they walked, she whipped out her phone and unblocked his number.
I’m so sorry. I misunderstood. Can we talk?
She tapped it out in a rush, not really thinking it through, but desperate to say something to him.
His typing dots didn’t appear. Nothing indicated he’d received the message. There was a good chance he’d blocked her number
by now, too, she realized with a heavy heart. And she couldn’t blame him.
“Here we are,” Alice announced when they turned the corner to her new office. The square room was half the size of Alice’s
but big enough for a desk, two chairs, maybe a plant, and had the coveted internal-facing window along with a whiteboard.
A small smile lifted Emmy’s lips despite her silent phone and breaking heart. “Thanks, Alice.”
“Of course. IT will bring your computer over in a bit and get you all set up. We’ll get you a new name plaque for the door too. Feel free to decorate however.”
Emmy already knew exactly what she was going to hang on the walls; she’d had it planned for months. Her framed degrees, a
championship pennant, the autographed bat she’d won in a charity raffle, and a photo of her brother from his rookie year.
She smiled at the thought of Josh’s photo smiling out at everyone who came to visit her. He’d hang behind her and keep an
eye on the hallway while she worked.
“Congrats, Emmy,” Alice said. “You deserve this.” She left her alone and clicked down the hall on her shiny heels.
Emmy set her tote on the empty desk. She rounded it and sank into her new chair. She smoothed her hands over the wood and
allowed herself a moment to appreciate what she’d accomplished. She looked down at her slender, feminine hands atop a surface
only men had utilized before. But it was hers now. She’d earned it, and no one could say differently.
Her phone hadn’t offered up any messages and as much as she wanted to forsake it all, ditch work, and go find Gabe, she forced
herself to partition her personal and professional lives. She couldn’t bail five minutes into her new job, nor could she be
distracted with so much new responsibility.
Being an adult was unfairly distressing at times.
By the time Emmy had boxed up her old desk and Ken from IT relocated her computer for her, the morning was half gone. And
she still had no messages from Axe Murderer.
“All set,” Ken said, and brushed his hands together when he finished positioning her computer on her new desk.
“Thanks.”
“No problem. Any questions?”
“No—actually, yes,” she said with a hint of trepidation in her voice. “Is it possible to recover a deleted email?”
He nodded. “Sure. As long as you deleted it in the past thirty days, it’ll be in your trash.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
She had in fact deleted Gabe’s email yesterday in a fit of anger and wondered if she had the nerve to read it now. She sat
at her new desk and entered her password. The screen shone to life, and she noted her inbox number had significantly jumped
in the past hour. She had messages from HR, colleagues in different departments who’d heard about her promotion, and an intimidating
number of data requests now that she held a senior position. The number pinged higher four times in the ten seconds she spent
staring at it.
“Okay, guess we’re doing this now...” she muttered and opened the first request.
The work instantly sucked her in. She was so in flow, crunching numbers, aggregating analyses, reporting out results, that
she skipped lunch. She hadn’t realized how late it had gotten until she had a moment to look up, and her stomach noisily growled.
It was after 3p.m.
She had thought of visiting a vending machine but the thought of hunting down Gabe’s deleted email weighed heavier. She’d
been working up the nerve to read it all morning but then welcomed the excuse of being too busy. Now she finally had a moment.
She took a breath and navigated to her trash folder.
There amid the spam, ads, and phishing scams sat a message from Gabe Olson, sent at 11:15a.m. yesterday. Subject line: Please read.
My Bird Girl,
I don’t know what you heard in the hallway this morning, but I would never lie to you.
I know how much you wanted the job and how much it means to you personally, and you absolutely deserve it.
The truth is, you’ve always intimidated the hell out of me.
I had my baseball career taken away, and then when you came along and were unstoppable at your job, I thought I was going to have this career taken away from me too.
But this job was never mine to lose. I can’t stand in your way.
You’ve shown me that I don’t need to win to be happy.
You’re better than me and you deserve the job, and I’m happy.
I want you. I don’t even care about the job if it means I get to be with you, and that’s how I know what matters. It’s you.
I wasn’t sure if my plan was going to work, so I wanted to make sure I could put it in motion before we got our hopes up.
I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry. I know I’ve done things in the past to make you question your trust in me, and I
have a reputation I’ve never dispelled working against me here, so I can take some blame for your reaction, but I swear, I
would never be dishonest or joke about anything that matters this much.
On that note, here’s some more honesty.
That fake number is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Like I said the other day, I would trade anything to have
a shot at being with you. What you said in the hallway about the way you feel, the truth is, I feel the same. I have for a
long time. Because of you, I’ve figured out how to quantify my feelings in more ways than one. I know writing messages to
each other is kind of our thing, but I’d rather say how I feel to your face than here. I’m going to come over at lunch. I
hope you’ll let me in so we can talk.
—Your Axe Murderer
Emmy read the email twice, the second time through a flood of messy tears. Her heart was positively broken in half but somehow
beating stronger than ever.
“Oh no,” she said, sobbing into her hand. He’d sent the message before he’d come over, and before she’d said awful things to him. The likelihood he still felt the same seemed slim. Another hard sob burst from her throat as she ached all the way to her toes.
Quantify my feelings made her think of the equation he’d written her; the complex model that he claimed accounted for the intuitive feelings he
had from being on the field. She didn’t think it was possible to do such a thing, but she also didn’t think it was possible
to feel like her heart was beating on the outside of her chest like a battered wound.
She clicked out of his email and found the file she’d sent herself with his equation in it when she’d transferred it from
the napkin. With a few more clicks and some keystrokes, she pulled it into the platform they used for analyses and called
in a dataset to test it out. She found Hollander’s recent game data, as Gabe instructed, and hit run . It spit out a series of numbers and symbols that her trained brain knew how to interpret, and she gasped. The model used
on Hollander’s data from the last week predicted his stats from this week, give or take a reasonable margin of error, and
more accurately than if she’d used her own equation. Gabe was right. He’d figured out how to quantify a feeling.
“Holy shit,” she whispered, half in awe and half in despair. He was so goddamn smart, and he’d done this for her. For her , to give her the same advantage he had. And she’d messed everything up. She threw her hand to her tearing eyes right as someone knocked on her open door.
“Congrat—” Pedro’s voice began to singsong before it sharply cut off. “What’s wrong?”
Emmy looked up to see Pedro and Silas standing at her door. Pedro held a giant cupcake bedazzled in pink frosting and golden