Chapter 50
Night Twenty
Zeke
“What in the actual fuck is this?” Timothy’s arms were crossed, his face a scowl.
He stepped forward and slapped a hand against one of Julian’s photos of the fire aftermath, then squinted at the Macon Telegraph article before he fished out his reading glasses to get a better look.
“Is this why you have been so distracted?”
“I haven’t been distracted,” Zeke said. “Barring a couple of days at Christmas and about thirty-six hours last week—”
“Two full days,” Timothy interrupted. “You went off the grid. And to my understanding it was to Georgia?”
“Whatever, I don’t owe you my itinerary. Do you want to know how many shits a day I take? Barring that, I haven’t missed a single workout, a single second of my rehab.”
“Not missing a single second and being singularly focused are two different things.” His pointer finger jabbed the evidence wall.
“Also, you do owe me your itinerary because you owe it to the team. I’m sure they’d be happy to monitor your shits too.
So seriously, do you want to explain what in the fuck this is? ”
“Not really,” Zeke said. Because he didn’t.
Timothy had stopped by unannounced while Sybil was out meeting Caleb, an invitation Zeke had shrugged off.
He didn’t tell Sybil that his arm was still smarting and that his trainer today had been snappish with him when he couldn’t complete all of his reps.
It wasn’t that Zeke blamed Sybil for distracting him—he wanted to find Betty too.
But it wasn’t that he didn’t blame her either.
If she hadn’t been so doggedly insistent that Betty was in trouble, Zeke honestly could have carried on with his life, with his physical therapy, with his team’s charted course for his return.
Timothy sighed, stuffed his hands in his pockets, which Zeke knew meant he was about to get serious.
He wished he hadn’t told his doorman to send Timothy up; he wished he hadn’t opened the door to greet him; he wished that he had stepped out of the way of that fucking line drive.
Then he would sleep like a newborn; then the complications in Betty’s life wouldn’t be his problem.
He wished that he weren’t the sort of person who was so singular in his focus that he thought of Betty as a problem.
He wished a lot of things, none of which he could do anything about now.
“Management is concerned,” Timothy said. “They need you ready in eight weeks. And no one in the training room thinks, as of now, you will be ready in eight weeks.”
“Dude, I don’t know what they want from me. I already told you, I’m doing the fucking work.”
“For how much they pay you, you better know what they want from you.” The temperature in Timothy’s tone had dipped considerably.
“And forgive me, but this”—he pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the photographs, the printouts—“does not give me reassurance that you aren’t filling your time with other bullshit. ”
“What I do in my off time really isn’t your concern,” Zeke said, which he knew was preposterous as soon as he said it.
He was a brand, and as Timothy had noted, an extremely expensive one.
In an alternate version of his life, he would have been consumed with his recovery.
But that ignored the entire problem in the first place.
All the analysts, all the sports writers, surely the entire MLB management, had watched the replay over and over again, slo-mo, slower-mo, freeze-framed, and they’d all concluded that Zeke simply got unlucky.
Didn’t move fast enough. But Zeke knew the truth: that he didn’t move at all.
How do you dig into a recovery when you aren’t sure that you want to be healed?
“We want to bring you to Arizona,” Timothy said. “Full rehab center on-site there, work around the clock to get you up for spring training.”
“No,” Zeke said.
“I don’t think I phrased this as a question.”
“I have some shit going on here, Timothy, and I’m not willing to just leave it next week or whatever.”
“I didn’t say next week. They want you out there sooner.”
“So you’re here to escort me down to the team plane?” Zeke scoffed, but Timothy just crossed his arms over his chest. He was actually here to escort him down to the team plane. “Well, I’m not doing it.”
“Because of this?” Now Timothy spun around and grabbed a postcard, one from Niagara Falls, then tore down three more. He flipped through them, tossing each one on the ground after examining them. “Because you have some weird fetish thing going on?”
“Fuck off, Timothy,” Zeke said, just as he heard the front door open, then close.
Sybil appeared in the kitchen doorway, still bundled in her parka, scarf, hat and Uggs. Her nose was ruby red, her mascara pooling under her lashes.
“Holy shit, it is like the Arctic tundra out there,” she said. Then, to Timothy: “Hi, I’m Sybil.”
“My agent,” Zeke said.
“Nice to meet you,” Timothy replied, because he was nothing if not superficial, extremely excellent at playing both good cop and bad. “I was just heading out. I tried to get Zeke to tell me all these secrets”—he pointed to the evidence wall—“but that bastard was tight-lipped as usual.”
“Oh.” Sybil glanced at Zeke and unwound her scarf. “Well—” She noticed the postcards on the planks on the kitchen floor, inhaled sharply, then stooped to grab them as if they were precious.
Zeke rushed Timothy to the entry. He didn’t need Sybil to explain anything to Timothy, lest he appear even more distracted than his agent already believed him to be.
A hodgepodge wall of a paper trail, a flimsy excuse for a couple days off in Georgia, a different woman with a key to his apartment than the one whom Timothy met last time.
“Plane will be wheels up tomorrow at seven a.m.,” Timothy said, and Zeke wanted to slug him across his perfect fucking veneered teeth. “This wasn’t really an optional RSVP, Zeke.”
“I’m an independent adult,” Zeke said.
“Okay, however you want to think about it,” Timothy said, his hand on the front doorknob. “But you’re an independent adult who is under contract.”
“What was that about?” Sybil said once the door had shut behind him.
Zeke was shaking. Anger was radiating from his pores. If he could levitate on rage, he would. He’d always known that ultimately, he was a commodity, but Timothy and his team had at least had the decency not to treat him like one.
He stared at Sybil, and he knew it wasn’t fair; he knew actually that he might be half in love with her by now, but he resented her presence so purely in this moment that it was all he could do to breathe the same air as she was.
“Zeke?” Her brow furrowed. Her hair was a hive from her hat, and he fought his impulse to take three long strides toward her, smooth it down, tuck it behind her ears.
“I have to go out of town for a while.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Okay.” Another one. “Is everything all right?”
“No, not really.” He started toward his bedroom, which required brushing past her to turn down the hall of his ridiculous apartment that his stupid salary negotiated by his stupid agent had paid for.
“Did I…” She followed him. “I’m sorry, are you mad at me?”
He didn’t know why she was apologizing to him, and that just made him angrier. She knew better than to apologize, and here she was, bringing herself down to his level.
“No,” he said. “And I have to pack.”
He opened the linen closet, pulled out a suitcase, unzipped it so violently that the zipper went off its track.
“Here,” she said. “Let me help.”
“I got it,” he said, though he clearly did not.
His fingers were still trembling, and the zipper would not abide and realign with the teeth.
He gave up and moved to his walk-in closet, where he pulled down clothes haphazardly and threw them the distance toward the bed, even when his elbow barked.
When he emerged, Sybil was still standing in his doorframe, her hands on both hips, the apology clearly a distant memory.
“How long will you be gone for?”
“Awhile. Some time. I don’t know.” Zeke opened his bureau drawer, grabbed a pile of underwear, then socks, tossed those on his bed too.
“I wandered around Grand Central after meeting Caleb,” she said. “Did you know they have storage lockers? That require keys?”
“Sybil, honestly.” Zeke paused, squeezed the bridge of his nose like she was a headache. “I have to leave. And I can’t deal with this right now. We are not, like, CSI investigators. I have an actual job.”
He pretended not to see her wince.
“So am I tracking down Betty on my own?”
Zeke stilled. Then took what he knew was an exasperated inhale, but he didn’t feel like he was in control of himself, like he was witnessing this moment from the outside and would regret it, but fuck if he could do anything about it. Not the first time, he realized.
“Look, I’m sorry, but I have a real life to deal with right now.
I can’t spend all my time chasing down a girl who might not even want to be found.
Much less might be responsible for burning down a building with people inside of it.
” He didn’t mean to say what he said next but did anyway.
When he thought about it later, he’d blame his exhaustion, even though that was lousy reasoning for being awful to people you love.
“This whole thing, this was all just supposed to be low stakes. Not complicated, not anything that took me away from my actual obligations. I have real obligations, you know.”
“You certainly do,” she said, and he retreated to the walk-in, so he didn’t have to see the judgment on her face.
A few minutes later he heard her in the kitchen, and then the front door closed, the latch clicking into place. The evidence wall was dismantled; the postcards that Timothy had tossed and she had retrieved, similarly gone.
Zeke plodded back to his room and sank onto his bed, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. His phone buzzed, and he grabbed it, hoping it was Sybil, hoping she’d absolve him of what an utter asshole he had just been.
Timothy: I’m not fucking around. 7am. White Plains.
He stood, and his knee popped. He suddenly felt a hundred years old. He grabbed a pile of clothes from the bed, and that’s when he saw his suitcase.
While he had been tossing clothes from his closet, Sybil had fixed the zipper, and now, everything aligned perfectly. Like there wasn’t a problem with it in the first place. Like it had never been broken at all.