Chapter 6
Brooke
My mother makes pot roast low and slow with red wine and fresh herbs and enough garlic to ward off every vampire in the Pacific Northwest. And tonight, sitting at the small table in my parents’ cottage with a glass of Cabernet and the windows cracked to the summer evening air coming off the water, it’s exactly what I need.
I take a sip of wine and stare at the half written story on my computer. I’ve spent the past several days building the story the way I always do, layer by layer.
Mom hums to herself at the stove, the way she has since I was small enough to sit on the counter and watch her cook.
I glance up from my laptop and smile at the sight of her, reading glasses pushed up on her head, wooden spoon in hand, completely in her element.
For a second I’m eight years old again, doing homework while she made dinner and quizzed me on state capitals.
From the next room, Dad calls out Mariners scores while he peels potatoes over a colander.
“Two-nothing, top of the sixth,” he announces. “Julio’s up.”
“About time,” Mom says without looking up from the roast. “He’s been cold all week.”
“He’s pressing,” Dad says. “You can see it in his stance. Trying to do too much instead of letting the ball come to him.”
“That’s what happens when you’re chasing a slump.” Mom adjusts the oven temperature and glances back at me. “Sweetie, did you catch that game last week against the Astros?”
“Caught it?” I close my laptop halfway and lean back in my chair. “I was screaming at my TV like a crazy person. Also, the replay clearly showed he was safe, and the umpire just stood there like he hadn’t seen the same footage as the rest of us.”
“That’s my girl.” She points her spatula at me, grinning. “We didn’t raise any fair-weather fans in this house.”
“Damn right we didn’t,” Dad hollers from the other room, and I laugh, shaking my head.
Baseball is the one language all three of us speak fluently. Dad grew up in Brooklyn going to Mets games with his grandfather, growing comfortable with the heartbreak of loving a team that disappoints more often than not.
He’s never stopped loving the Mets, but he adopted the Mariners the summer he moved to Washington and met my mother at what was then called the Kingdome. He still says he fell in love with her when she told him his take on pitching rotations was “aggressively wrong” and then explained exactly why.
I grew up between them on the couch arguing about batting orders and yelling at umpires, and it’s probably the reason I ended up in sports journalism in the first place.
I close the laptop fully and push it aside, giving myself permission to stop working for the night. Through the wall of windows, the water is going dark and still, the last bit of light sitting low on the horizon like it’s not ready to let go.
Dad found this place five years ago when he retired from the school district, a cottage tucked into the trees with a dock that needs replacing and a kitchen that didn’t, and Mom fell in love with it before they’d finished the tour.
One bedroom, butcher block counters, and a view of the sound that’s worth twice what they paid.
It’s been surprisingly nice being back home.
Not just tolerable, which is what I’d braced myself for, but pleasant in a way that caught me off guard.
I love New York City too much to ever leave it completely, but the place I wanted to run away from as a teenager is actually pretty wonderful, and I’m not sure what to do with that realization now that I’m sitting in the middle of it.
Well, it’s all wonderful apart from Dominic.
My fingers tighten around the stem of my glass.
He keeps working his way into my head, and I can’t figure out how to make it stop.
Our arguments won’t leave me alone, and I keep replaying them, turning them over like evidence, dissecting every word choice and shift in his expression.
I compose entire speeches in my head, devastating takedowns that leave him speechless, and then I remember that he’s not even here and I’m literally arguing with a man who isn’t in the room.
And the worst part, the part I really don’t want to examine, is that I keep reaching for my phone.
Hoping for a text that gives me an excuse to engage.
To fire something back. To feel that jolt again, that electric crackle of going head to head with someone who doesn’t back down, who matches me word for word and doesn’t flinch.
From the living room, Dad lets out one of those sharp, sudden cheers. “There we go! That’s what I’m talking about!”
I set my glass down and press my thumb against the edge of the table just to give my hands something to do besides reach for my phone again. I focus on the texture of it, the grain under my fingernail, anything to pull my thoughts away from Dominic Midnight and the way he takes up space in my head.
“The roast is getting there,” Mom says, pulling me out of my head. She wipes her hands on her apron and sits at the table across from me with her own glass of wine. “Now, tell me about the story.”
“It’s going well,” I say, leaning back in my chair. “I’ve got full access, and Roman’s a great subject. He and Dominic have a dynamic that’s compelling. But we’ll see how it all plays out in the New York City fight.”
“Good, I’m glad to hear that, sweetie,” she says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She tilts her head at me. “Though we’re going to miss having you here when you head back to New York.”
“I’m going to miss you guys too,” I tell her, and I mean it.
Everything about tonight feels so easy, so comfortable, that it makes my lack of trips home in recent years feel inexcusable.
The older I get, the more I realize my parents aren’t going to be around forever, and I’ve been wasting time I can’t get back by staying away.
“And how is Dominic?” she asks, with the careful casualness of a woman who has been waiting all evening to ask this exact question. “I know you two haven’t always gotten along.”
That’s the understatement of the century. She knows the broad strokes. The scholarship disaster, the article I wrote in my twenties, the fact that Dominic and I can barely be in the same room without it turning into a fight. She does not know that we slept together in high school.
“He’s fine. The whole thing is tolerable, barely,” I say, as if I wasn’t literally obsessing about him before she sat down. “I’ll be glad when I have enough material to finish the piece and not have to speak to him anymore.”
She smiles at me and takes a sip of her wine. “Okay, if you say so.”
“What?” I ask, even though I’m not sure why I’m poking at something I definitely don’t want her to finish.
She shakes her head, looking down at her wine glass. “Nothing. I just think it’s funny how worked up you still get about him,” she says. “That’s all.”
“I’m not worked up,” I say.
“Alright.” She takes another sip, still smiling. “You’re not worked up.”
I narrow my eyes at her, but she just pats my hand once and gets up to check the roast, humming again like we were never even talking about it.
I finish the last sip of my wine and move my laptop and notebook to the counter while Mom pulls the roast out of the oven, and the whole kitchen goes warm with it. I grab plates from the cabinet next to the fridge.
Dad comes in from the living room rubbing his hands together. “Sorry, sorry, that game is hard to walk away from,” he says, already pulling the salad bowl from the fridge. “Here, let me get this going. What a game though!”
“I’ve been keeping my eye on it. And I told you his mechanics looked different this season,” Mom says, carving the roast. “He’s staying back on the ball better.”
“She’s right,” I say.
“She’s always right,” Dad says, leaning over to kiss Mom’s cheek. “I learned that early.”
We settle in for dinner, and it’s wonderful.
The roast is so tender I can cut it with the side of my fork, mashed potatoes with too much butter, which is the only correct amount, and green beans from the garden Dad’s been tending since retirement.
They’ve taken up kayaking on weekend mornings, which I’m still wrapping my head around because my father has never been a morning person in his life.
“It’s beautiful out there at seven a.m.,” he tells me, and Mom and I exchange a look because this is the man who once called anything before nine o’clock “an act of violence against the human body.” Retirement is a powerful drug.
It’s nearly ten by the time we’re done, having talked and laughed our way through dinner and dessert and another glass of wine on the porch, and the only sounds are the gentle lap of waves against the dock and the occasional call of a night bird in the trees.
For a moment I let myself imagine a version of my life where I come back here more often, where I don’t let work consume every weekend and holiday, where I remember that the people who love me aren’t going to be here forever waiting for me to find the time.
When it’s time for me to head back to the inn, I hug them both longer than I usually do, and Mom squeezes me tight before she lets go.
“Drive safe,” she says. “Text when you get back.”
“I will,” I promise.
The night air is cool against my skin as I walk to my car, and I take my time, letting the quiet settle around me. I sit for a minute with the window cracked, letting the breeze wash over me.
When my phone buzzes, I pick it up immediately and my stomach drops straight through the floor. Four notifications from The Sporting Standard’s app. I tap the first one with a sense of dread already building in my chest, and the headline hits me like a punch to the throat.
Inside the Camp: How Roman Kincaid and Coach Dominic Midnight Are Preparing for the Biggest Fight of Their Lives.
No. No, no, no.