Cleat Chaser (Extra Innings #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Savannah

April

When I get to the house, two men are out front, hitching my fifth stepmother’s third-favorite Porsche to a tow truck.

I’ve been rehearsing what I was going to say to my dad for an hour.

Now every word flees my head as I stride up to the two men—I’m too tall to be unobtrusive—and clear my throat.

“Hello,” I say and give them my brightest I’m in charge of this situation smile as I wait for them to explain themselves.

No explanation comes.

The men—there’s an older one with a mustache and a younger one with curly hair, but they’re both in identical khaki coveralls—glance at each other. Curly shrugs. “You wanna tell her?”

“Tell me what?” I ask.

“You Mr. Burke’s daughter?” Mustache asks.

“Yes, I’m Savannah.” More smile, the kind I learned early on.

There was a smile for your father’s friends at a dinner party and a smile for contentious business negotiations.

Each gets you something different—acceptance, deference.

Neither man does any more than glance at the other incredulously as if to say, Can you believe this—

“Maybe you should go have a conversation with your daddy,” Curly says. Then he mutters something under his breath, almost low enough that I miss the word. That word I’ve had thrown at me over the years. That word I hate. Princess.

I didn’t grow up in a castle, just a massive house in a gated community, surrounded by ten-foot fencing as effective as any moat, staffed by people instructed to cater to my every childhood whim, with a rotating cast of stepmothers like temporary queens.

Five to be precise, and the fifth one’s weekday car is currently being attached to the back of a tow truck.

I’ve been so focused on that I haven’t really examined the rest of the house. Now that I’m looking…the curtains are drawn, like the house is in mourning. The garage door is open and…

Where are the rest of the cars?

Mustache turns away from me with an eyeroll to finish hitching the car to his truck. I get a flash of the logo on the back of his coveralls. Not a repair shop, like I was expecting. Mickey’s Repos.

My heart leaps to my throat. I won’t panic, not in front of these men who clearly think I’m a spoiled little princess.

There must be some explanation for this.

My father has money. That’s been the one thing I could bank on all my life, even as he went through wives the way some people went through rent the runway clothes: something to be paraded out then returned.

“Thank you for letting me know,” I say to the men. I smile, with my teeth and not with my eyes, then march myself into the house before they can see the slight wobble in my chin. I will not cry. I will not.

Inside, the house is empty of furniture.

No high-backed couches. No art on the walls.

Just unfaded patches on the carpet, dark squares in the paint where frames once hung.

Movers circulate from room to room loading our belongings onto various carts.

One of them wheels out the large living room rug I used to play on as a kid, the one that has a grape juice stain on the corner that no amount of steam cleaning could ever get out.

I don’t know why that gets to me, but it does.

I blink tears out from my eyes. “You can’t take that one,” I say.

The mover pauses, brow furrowed in confusion, then produces a thin yellow sheet of paper, on which is written an order in grease pencil. Everything out.

Why are they taking everything? What is going on?

“Never mind.” I race down the hall—they’ve left a few family pictures so that we look like ghosts haunting our own house—and into my father’s study.

His desk is there at least, a big solid chestnut piece that Stepmom Three, Cherri, got.

I loved Cherri. She would take me to estate sales and let me try on all the glamorous clothing that smelled like old-lady cigarettes and if the auctioneers got mad that I was climbing on the furniture, she’d simply buy it.

But Cherri had left, and the desk had stayed. There’s a sign stuck to its side. Another sheet of that thin yellow paper. My tears threaten to come back.

“Daddy?” I call, and my father emerges from the short hallway connecting his office to the back entrance to the kitchen, then takes his customary place behind his desk. When I think about my father, that’s how I always envision him: as solid as the chestnut of its wood.

I get my height from him—we’re both close to six feet—but now my father looks somehow shorter and wearier than his fifty-something years. “Sav, honey, I didn’t want you to find out like this.”

“Find out about what?” Though I can already put the pieces together: something has gone very, very wrong.

“Well, it seems we’re in something of a financial pickle.” He says it lightly, but the circles under his eyes tell a different story.

“They’re taking the cars,” I say.

“Yes.”

“And the furniture.”

“Yes.”

“Who exactly?”

“There’s a bank situation.”

“A bank situation?” I’ve rarely seen my father look uncomfortable. A captain of industry should know how to steer a ship through choppy waters, he likes to say. His hands drop to the top of his desk chair. One of his knuckles pulls white.

“It seems we overleveraged some of our assets and the market being what it is…” He clears his throat. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that some of the, erm, financial reserves you were relying on aren’t going to be available, given the current circumstances.”

“So the money is…”

“Gone.”

“Gone?” That much money doesn’t just…vanish. “I don’t think I understand.”

“Savannah,” he begins, “I’ve always admired your strength.

You get that from your mother.” He always talks about her like she’s dead.

Last I heard she was following her bliss, living up in the mountains with her former pottery teacher, making terrible crockery together.

“You’re going to need to be strong now. There’s no easy way to tell you this, but your accounts are among the things we needed to leverage and—”

My pulse starts thrumming; a bright spot appears in my vision. My nose fills with a faint burning smell. Not right now. My strength isn’t the only thing I inherited from my mother—I also got my chestnut brown hair and my chronic fucking migraines.

The smell intensifies. The lights get brighter.

I blink away tears, swallow against a wave of nausea.

Migraines are like the world’s worst superpower: you don’t get a choice when they activate and most of the time you just have to let them run their course.

Usually that course leaves me feeling run over.

My father is still talking—his words are muffled as if they’re coming through deep water. I don’t understand the sounds, but the shape is clear: he took the money he’d promised me and gambled it on business ventures…and lost.

He’s broke.

So I’m broke.

My knees go weak. My migraine hovers in the distance, like a storm I can see on the horizon.

“Sav, you look pale.” My father comes around from behind his desk and ushers me into one of the cushy blue chairs in the corner of his office where I used to hang out as a kid and pretend that I was doing business right along with him.

I sink into the soft upholstery. Tears gather at my lash line. I squeeze them back. These are just choppy waters. I can make it through. Lights begin to blink behind my eyelids, pop-pop-pop, each accompanied by a flash of pain.

Something cool taps my hand—my father handing me a glass of ice water. He must have gone to the kitchen and back. I take a sip. The water tastes metallic, a sure sign this migraine will be a bad one.

“Why are you here, anyway?” he asks, after I manage to open my eyes.

“I wanted to talk with you about—” I try to remember the phrasing I used when I was rehearsing in the mirror this morning. “A potential change that will affect my educational and career trajectory.”

“Really?” But he doesn’t sound displeased. My father has never approved of my studying nursing. Let someone else change bedpans, he liked to say.

“There’s a combined five-year master’s program at Morningside University in Atlanta I’m interested in,” I say.

“In nursing?”

“In a related field.” I smile. In a negotiation what you don’t say is as important as what you do.

So I don’t say I want to go into biomedical research to find genes that cause migraines.

I don’t say that I can see myself working in basic scientific research—in other words, pursuing a noble cause.

Noble causes, as my father likes to remind me, never earned anyone a second home or the victory of having vanquished a business foe—or the kind of wealthy, country club husband he wants for me.

“I checked and they’ll approve most of my transfer credits.

In fact…” I build up to what I was coming here to tell him, “I applied, and I’ve already been accepted.

” A process that was simple once I assured my advisor that I would not be seeking financial aid support from Morningside.

“That’s a very good university, Sav.”

“Yes.”

“And what must be a very impressive program.”

“It is. Fortunately, you have a very impressive daughter.”

My father smiles—brief, proud—then his face falls. “If that’s the case, we need to talk about some of the realities of your tuition.”

“My tuition?” It didn’t even occur to me that that could go too, along with the furniture.

“There’s a certain amount of belt-tightening that we’re all doing and well, I’m not certain if we can outlay that as an expense.” He grimaces. “Savannah, I want to give you the world…” But from his tone, it sounds more like my world is being yanked out from under me.

My head throbs, a bright, flashing pulse like a warning sign.

“Actually, I need to lie down.” I pull myself up from the chair.

“We can talk later.” I pull myself from my father’s office to the stairs, scale each riser, then practically crawl down the hallway to my childhood bedroom.

The door is shut, the sign on it spelling out Savannah in pink sparkly letters with a tiara underneath.

I imagine the soft lavender scent of my childhood bed, the fluffy pink comforter that’s a remnant of my princess phase.

But when I open the door, the movers have taken everything out of here too. All that greets me is the bare floor and pink walls where my dreams used to be.

Somehow, I drag myself out of the house and back into my car. Curly and Mustache are nowhere to be seen. I start the engine and my Lexus rumbles to life. They’re not gonna repossess this too, right? I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to know the answer.

The migraine holds back long enough for me to drive to my dorm room—a singleton because I’ve never shared a room with anyone else, not even the occasional stepsibling.

I shut the lights off, shut the door, turn on my mister and set my alarm.

You get eight hours of a breakdown and then you need to figure this out.

That’s the thing about being a princess: sometimes, you have to rescue yourself.