Chapter 65
Morning
Zeke
“I got a text with this address,” he said. “I was waiting at the airport, then drove straight here.” She looked worn down and strands of her hair defied gravity. Part of him hoped she’d leap into his arms, like they hadn’t spent two weeks in a silent fight. She did not.
“Levi,” Sybil said.
“I don’t understand?”
“Levi took my phone. He texted you from it. Which, I mean, I guess it’s good that we have confirmation that he’s not a kidnapper. Just a thief.”
He took a step toward her, willed her to do the same toward him, but when she didn’t, he closed the distance between them. “I’m sorry about before.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I’m sorry about being self-centered and crabby and rude before,” he tried again.
Now she nodded, a tiny spark of a smile hinting at the edges of her lips.
“I had to sort some things out. But I have. I did.” She nodded a second time.
“And before you tell me anything else, before we get into whatever this mess is…” He drifted because he was nervous. Jesus, he was fucking nervous!
He’d rehearsed all of this in the car, what he would say, how he would stride toward her with the confidence of an All-Star, hold her face in his hands and kiss her until her knees went weak.
But now, standing in front of her, he felt like a kid in eighth grade, screwing up the nerve at the middle school dance.
She blinked, and he snapped out of it. This was Sybil. He had nothing to be nervous about.
“Syb,” he said. “I’m really fucking sorry.
And I really fucking missed you.” Then he dipped his head toward hers, tilted her chin up to meet his and kissed her.
He’d kissed enough women to know that he caught her by surprise.
Not just her, though, him too. The way his blood ran hot, the way his heart thumped in the best of ways, the way his brain stopped with any singular thought except her.
Her. After a beat, Sybil gave into it, too, her body relaxing against his, and he wondered if this was what he needed, they both needed, to finally have some peace. To finally get some rest.
She pulled back first. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to…” He shook his head.
“I’ve needed to do that for weeks.” He dipped his head down again, kissed her one more time as if he needed proof.
He wanted to tell her that they should get out of here, that they should go somewhere private, that he needed to take off all of her clothes and kiss every last inch of her, but, well, he knew her better than that.
He knew that she was here for Betty, and he also knew the best way he could prove himself to her right now was to honor that by helping.
“Excuse me,” the lady behind the counter said. “Can I get you some coffee?”
She had absolutely not a single look of recognition in her eye, and for that Zeke was more than a little grateful.
At the airport, he’d taken selfies and written autographs.
The rental-car lady checked his driver’s license, then said, “Holy shit,” and he stood there and had to make small talk about how her eight-year-old nephew might be destined for the majors.
He just wanted to be normal for a moment, just wanted to be normal with Sybil for more than a moment.
“That would be amazing,” he said. “And a dozen donuts for the road.” He reached for Sybil’s hand: “Do we…should we…do we need to speed it along?”
“I thought your team had you off sugar and refined carbs?” Sybil asked.
“And yes, we do.” She bit her lower lip, looking a little stunned, like she couldn’t believe what he’d just done but in a good way.
Zeke’s belly stirred with joy. “I just need to finish my coffee. Though I think I probably need to quit.”
“Quit what?” He sank into a booth, and she sank right next to him. He braided his fingers through hers beneath the table.
“All of this. I’m not the intrepid detective I thought I was; I’m certainly not intrepid, and I don’t know why I ever imagined I was a detective. So…can we have five more minutes to sit here?”
“Five minutes to sit here and feel sorry for yourself? Absolutely. I could use some coffee too.”
“I feel as if you’re mocking me,” she said.
“Then you would feel correctly.”
“That’s not very nice. Mocking an old lady when she is down.”
He leaned over. Kissed her again quickly.
“I’m giving you five minutes of pity. I never thought Sybil Bowman needed more than five minutes to accomplish anything. Also, not old.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “Anyway, to your question—I might be off more than just sugar and carbs,” he said. “I might be off the roster.”
It wasn’t quite nine a.m. in Arizona. Someone at the training facility would have noticed his absence. Timothy probably thought he overslept and was on his way to pound on the condo’s front door. In an hour or so, all hell was going to break loose.
Sybil nodded, just once. “Want to talk about it? We have four minutes.”
They untangled their hands, and he sipped the coffee, which was black and hot and felt like gasoline for his bloodstream, in a good way.
“Not particularly,” he said. “But I do want to apologize again.”
“Look,” she sighed, “you do have a right to prioritize yourself. No one can blame you for that.”
“But there are better ways I could have done it. I’m sorry I was cold, that I took it out on you.”
“I told my kids I was leaving their dad by announcing he was fucking his coworker at Thanksgiving,” she said. “Maybe we both need a little reprieve.”
Zeke dipped his head back and laughed, his abdominal muscles seizing, like they had atrophied from lack of happiness in Sybil’s absence.
“Okay,” he said. “But still.”
“Since we’re on the clock, the big bit of news is that there’s a new megachurch in the area,” Sybil said.
“A new…” Zeke started.
“Yes, exactly,” she answered, because they could speak each other’s language now, nearly finish each other’s thoughts.
Zeke felt something joyful bubble up in him again, not lust, but…
was it contentedness? What he had been missing, he realized, as Sybil nudged her half-eaten plate of donuts toward him, all through his career, was a sense of connection.
Being the best in the league was fantastic until it was no longer particularly interesting to him.
You challenge yourself until you run out of challenges, and then, evidently, you freeze in front of a line drive that both you and your agent well know you could have dodged, and you use it as an excuse to quit.
Because you don’t have the emotional tools to say: Hey, I could stand a little help here, a little support, a little friendship, a little love.
I want to do something else with my life, but self-destruction is the only visible path out of it.
“So Betty…” he said, putting the pieces together.
“And Levi,” she answered.
“Their dad is maybe not so dead after all?”
“I think she came all this way to stop running away from him, to end his pull on them. Levi said”—she stopped, sighed—“Levi said that their dad would never let Betty go if he had a choice in the matter. So maybe Betty is going to leave him with no choice in the matter.”
“And Levi is going to stop her?” Zeke asked.
Sybil drummed her fingers over the faux-wood table. “Stop her, help her, I’m not clear. He is somewhere between a savior and a lunatic, and I’m not sure that I have figured it out.”
“Well, I’ll help you figure it out,” he said. He reached under the table, linked his fingers into hers again and squeezed. When she squeezed back, he felt like it was the first time on the mound the night of his major league debut. All nerves and electricity.
“Your arm?” she asked.
“Oh yeah, good as new. Sore after training but in a good way.”
“Modern medicine,” she said.
He stood. “Come on, time’s up.” To the donut lady, who had a box waiting for him, he said, “This new megachurch? Can you give us directions?”
When they were nearly there, Sybil turned to him.
“The fire, I forgot. You didn’t tell me who started it. And how you figured it out.”
“Levi didn’t tell you?” Zeke asked. They were on a wide-open two-lane highway. Yellowed grass, barren trees, an occasional cow zipped by.
“I didn’t ask,” she said. “To be honest, I’d forgotten that the fire mattered. I only wanted to find Betty.”
“The fire has to matter,” he said. “Because that’s what set this whole thing in motion.”
Zeke’s GPS announced that they’d be making a turn in a thousand feet, then their destination was half a mile down the road. He veered right around the bend, and that’s when they saw it. Zeke was so stunned that he nearly careened the car onto the shoulder of the road into the aluminum guardrail.
“Zeke!” Sybil. “Oh my god.”
He slammed on the brakes to get his wits about him and turned to face her, but she was as pale, as stunned as he must have been.
“Go!” she shouted. “Don’t stop, we need to go!”
“Is it…is that a building?” he asked. “Is that…”
“Just go!” she said again. “Go.”
He startled out of his stupor and rammed his foot on the accelerator, so hard that Sybil’s head jolted back against her headrest.
There in the distance, a plume of smoke snaked into the air, rising up like a pox, like a curse that would trail Aaron Jones no matter where he ran.