Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Dr. Nora Bell
There’s a different energy in the room today.
I noticed it before they sat down. I happened to see them through my window, getting out of the same Uber, walking into my office side by side with no deliberate distance between them.
In my line of work, you read body language the way a sailor reads the wind.
They weren’t just walking together. They’re no longer putting in the effort to stay apart.
Three weeks ago, they arrived in separate Ubers seven minutes apart.
Progress doesn’t always announce itself. It’s usually found in the little details. Rarely do two people come into my office and announce, you’re the best, we’re fixed, thanks for the help.
Both men settle on the couch. Still opposite ends, but the angles of their bodies have shifted. Decker’s knee is pointed toward the center. Foster’s arm rests along the back cushion closest to his brother, instead of pressed against the opposite armrest, ready to bolt at any moment.
I let the room settle before I begin.
“Last time we talked about the split and your younger years,” I say. “Mark Ripley. How he came into Decker’s life.” Both of their gazes land on me. “I’d like to move the timeline to college.”
Foster blows out a breath, which tells me we’re about to delve into some deep, murky waters.
“So, this is where you reconnected?”
“Yeah. We went to colleges near each other.” Decker answers first, which doesn’t surprise me.
Foster’s thumb moves along the back of the couch. “It was pure coincidence that we both got scholarships so close together.”
I turn to Decker. “And how did that feel? Foster being that close again?”
“Good,” Decker says simply. “It was the most we’d seen each other since we were eleven. When our schedules lined up, we’d go to one another’s games.”
Foster nods, and the tiniest smile forms, as if he’s remembering.
“So, the proximity helped?” I ask.
“A lot.” He glances at Foster. “It was just the two of us. Without anyone managing us. Not Mom. Not Dad. Not any of the family bullshit.”
I note the phrase without anyone managing us—meaning every interaction before college had a parent attached to it, shaping it, limiting it.
“Foster,” I say, “what was that period like for you?”
He clears his throat. “Good… strange at first. I didn’t know how to be around him without it feeling forced. Like we were trying to be brothers because we were supposed to. We’d lost our connection.”
“And did that change?”
“Yeah,” he answers quieter. “It did.”
I allow the silence into the room, letting them reflect on the time of their lives when, I think, they felt like brothers.
Decker looks at his hands. There’s something careful in how he’s holding himself.
“We’d get food after games,” Foster continues.
“Drive around. Go to parties.” His jaw shifts.
“Not to sound conceited, but when you’re the hot player getting the attention of coaches and expecting offers…
well, people aren’t always rooting for you.
And it was good to have him because”—Foster looks at Decker—“you didn’t put me on a pedestal or make me feel like you were wishing for my downfall.
We bonded in a way you don’t always get to with your teammates at that stage.
It was nice to have someone on my side to talk to. ”
It’s the most Foster has ever let me in, and Decker’s smile says he agrees and appreciates Foster saying it out loud.
“And you didn’t get that with your father?”
“No.” Foster’s quick to cut off that line of thinking. “Dad wanted a player. He didn’t want a son.” He says it the way you say something you’ve already mostly made peace with. “So having Deck around was… I didn’t know I needed it until I had it.”
I let his vulnerable confession take up space in the room. For a man who has spent most of his life practicing self-sufficiency, that sentence cost him something. I want Foster to know I heard and appreciate it.
Decker stills, but I see his throat work.
“Me too.” Decker’s gaze shifts to me, as if he’s giving Foster room too. “It was hard being away from home, but in a way, we weren’t. We found each other. Even on parents’ weekend, Mom and Dad actually went to dinner like we were a normal family.”
Foster laughs. “Until the check came.”
Decker’s head rocks back. “God, them arguing about who pays. That might be the last time they were ever in a room together.”
I let them laugh and share the memory, a small ordinary thing that felt like family. These moments matter as much as the painful ones. Sometimes more because they show people what they’re actually fighting for.
“So, how long were things good?”
“Three years,” they say in unison, and glance at one another from the corners of their eyes.
“How did it all work then?”
“Ripley would have us over for dinner sometimes. He’d come to my games when he could,” Decker says.
Foster makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. His gaze drifts to the window.
“What is it?” My head tilts.
He shakes his head once, as though he’s deciding whether to say it.
“Foster?” I ask.
“It’s just—” He turns back, and his gaze meets Decker’s. There’s an edge there I haven’t seen directed at his brother yet today. “He hid it from me. I just found out.”
Decker meets his gaze. “What?”
“About Ripley.” He pauses, and I can see him selecting the version of this he’s willing to say out loud. “About him and Mom.”
Decker says nothing, and the stifling tension that usually lives in this room reappears.
“Why did you keep that from me? Let me play for him without knowing about him and Mom?” Foster’s voice stays even, which I can tell is only because he’s trying so hard to keep it that way.
Decker’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t deflect. “It wasn’t… I didn’t think it was my thing to tell. It was Mom’s. And by then it had been over for a long time.”
“But you knew, and I didn’t.” Foster still doesn’t raise his voice, a testament, I think, to how badly he wants to improve his relationship with his brother. “The whole time we were rebuilding something, getting close, and you’re sitting on that.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. I was twenty years old.”
“I was twenty years old too.”
“And the truth is…”
“What?” Foster positions himself to face Decker directly, resting his back against the arm of the couch.
“I didn’t want you to blow up your entire career,” Decker says.
“Oh, so you had to coddle me?”
“It’s not coddling.” Decker presses the heels of his palms to his eyes. “You know what you would have done, how you would have reacted back then, so let’s not pretend you would have handled that news without blowing up your future.”
Foster sits for a moment, his thumb tracing the same lines on the couch as when we started this conversation, the clench to his jaw he always has when he doesn’t want to admit to something. “Maybe, but…”
I gently step in. “Foster, when you found out—how did it make you feel?”
His gaze never lifts off his brother. “It made me feel stupid. Like I was the last one to know something about my own family. Like I’m the outsider again.”
There it is.
The line from childhood all the way to the present. Foster has spent his whole life feeling like an outsider in his own family—being the last to know things that concern him, his father moving him south, his mother’s life moving on without him. And now this secret.
“I’m sorry,” Decker says. “I thought I was protecting you.”
“Sometimes you have to let people choose their own reactions—good or bad, healthy or not,” I say.
Decker inhales and exhales but says nothing.
“Okay, let’s move on for the moment. Junior year puts you at what, twenty-one?”
Foster and Decker look at each other. A quick look, half a second at most, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know that some looks between people carry the weight of entire conversations they’ve never had out loud. This is one of those. I make a note and wait.
“We had a good stretch junior year,” Foster says. “Our teams were doing well. We were both playing the best baseball of our lives up to that point. The draft was coming.” Something crosses his face. “Things were… good.” Foster’s thumb goes still on the back of the couch.
“Junior year was when…” Decker fills in the way he always does, trying to make things easier for Foster.
Something in my gut says Foster needs to be the one to admit whatever happened to ruin their relationship. “Foster, what happened junior year?”
He looks at me, at his brother, and exhales. “That’s when I started dating Penelope.”
It’s like the name sucks all the oxygen from the room, and tension leaks in from every crevice to fill the space.
Foster doesn’t look at Decker.
Decker doesn’t look at Foster.
I do my best to hide my own shock at this revelation.