Chapter 32
He let Luke and Brady talk him into coming, but it was Morgan's persistence that won at the end of the day.
Sailor Jon's was the last place he wanted to be right now. Any night. But especially tonight, because tonight was the first night in three weeks, he'd agreed to leave the facility and the rental and sit at a table with people and pretend the empty chair at the end didn't exist.
Three weeks since she told him his world was too big. Three weeks since she left for Jacksonville. Three weeks since she stopped being his.
The workout with the Braves was in three weeks, assuming the hand cooperated. He should be resting it. Instead, he was here.
"Beer?" Brady said.
"You drinking tonight?"
"I drink."
"You drink Diet Mountain Dew."
"I drink Coors Light when the mood strikes."
Brady handed him a longneck. Beck took a drink. Felt the cool burn go down. Gave Brady a nod.
Luke and Addison walked in. They stopped at the bar and Todd handed Luke a beer and Addison a margarita. They sat and Addison immediately turned her attention to Morgan as if they hadn't spent the entire day together already.
Beck was just relieved they'd finally stopped treating him like a wounded animal and started treating him like everyone else again.
Almost everyone. Morgan's eyes went to the door every time it opened. Quick. There and back before the conversation moved on. The third time Beck caught it, he understood. Morgan wasn't waiting on anybody. She was standing guard.
He eased up around the third round. Deep in a conversation with Brent and Luke about whether playing at elevation in Colorado actually made it easier to hit.
Luke said yes. Brent said the ball carried but the pitchers adjusted.
Beck said neither of them had ever played in Denver so neither of them knew and Luke said "I hit .
340 in Coors Field" and Brent said "I rest my case" and the table laughed and for ten minutes the night felt like it was supposed to feel.
That's when he heard Addison's voice. The voice from the Bronx.
"You've got to be freaking kidding me."
He heard Ashley gasp. He heard Morgan go quiet, which was the loudest sound of the night in a bar on a Friday in December.
Luke turned red. Brady and Brent turned away. Beck didn't have to turn around to know Kirstin Green had just walked back on the island and into her bar.
He turned anyway.
She was smiling. Talking to everyone she passed.
Handing out hugs like she'd been gone a lifetime and had finally returned home.
She was laughing. She had on a black dress that hit above mid-thigh, heels, her hair down.
She moved through the room talking to regulars, touching arms, leaning in, doing the thing she'd done behind the bar for six years.
Reading the room. Working the room. Being Jon's daughter in Jon's bar.
She never turned to the table. Not once. She moved through the bar and she talked to everyone in it except the six people who'd spent three weeks putting the man at the end of the table back together.
Morgan broke first. She stood and started toward Kirstin. "I'm going to kill?—"
Brady caught her. Her feet came off the floor by an inch.
"Put me down."
"Not till you relax and promise me you'll sit back down."
She turned on Brady with a look that could have cut him open. She breathed heavy and hard but kept her eyes on his.
"Fine," she said. "Let me go."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
Brady released her. She sat back down. Hard.
"This is bullshit," she said.
The table started talking. Angry voices. His friends turning on the woman he loved in an instant. It should have felt good. They cared about him. They had his back. They were defending him.
It didn't feel good. It made it worse. All of it made it worse. They'd spent three weeks getting him out of the cage and back to a barstool and it had taken her ten seconds to undo all of it.
He finished the beer.
"To hell with it," he said.
The table went quiet.
"Beck," Luke said. "You okay?"
"I'm fantastic. I just figured something out."
All eyes on him. Brady had set his beer down. Taken his eyes off Morgan.
"Yeah," Beck said. "I'm good. I'm Ethan Beck.
Somewhere along the way I forgot that." He laughed and it came out tired and real and he took one last look around Sailor Jon's, the bar, the bottles, the string lights, the tables where he'd sat a hundred times since September.
"I love it here. I love all of you, more than you'll ever know.
" He took another look around the room. "But I don't belong here. "
He stood. He opened his wallet and put five hundred-dollar bills on the table. "Brent, share the beer money with everyone else."
Brent didn't smile.
"What are you doing, Ethan?" Addison said.
"I'm going to pack for Atlanta. I'm going home. I'm going back to the show." He turned to Brady. "Thank you for everything you did for me." He turned to Luke. "I'll see your ass in Cooperstown."
"I'll be waiting for you," Luke said.
Beck smiled at everyone. Nodded his head. Turned.
Fifty feet to the door and she was twenty feet to his right, leaning against the bar, talking to a guy he'd never seen.
The guy was smiling at her. Leaning in. Friday night confidence and a pretty girl and a drink in his hand.
He had no idea who she was or what she'd walked out of or the six people at the table behind her who were watching it all burn.
One foot in front of the other. To the Range Rover. To the rental to scoop up Hudson. Back to the show. A solid plan.
Then he heard his name.
"You running, Beck?"
He didn't stop.
"Yeah, that's what I figured," she said. "Run back to the real life. Put this little place in your rearview. It served its purpose."
He stopped. He wasn't sure how close she was but he felt her. Every bit of her.
"I didn't run," he said. "I stayed. You quit. You ran."
"Go to hell, Beck."
The guy from the bar appeared beside her. Beck hadn't asked for this. He'd been walking to the door. He'd been leaving.
"Hey." The guy stepped forward. "I don't know what's going on here, but you need to leave her alone."
Beck turned to him. Just a guy. Polo shirt, decent haircut, a beer he'd been nursing. A man on a Friday night in a bar on an island who saw a woman in trouble and stepped up because that's what decent men do. Wrong place. Wrong night. Wrong woman to step in front of.
"Walk away, man," Beck said. "This isn't about you."
"I said leave her alone."
"It's fine," Kirstin said to the guy. "It's fine, just?—"
"No, it's not fine," the guy said. He put his hand on Beck's chest.
Luke and Brady were there before Beck could respond. Luke grabbed Beck's arm and Brady stepped between Beck and the guy and the whole thing started moving toward the front door because Luke was walking Beck out, physically, his hand on his arm, his voice in his ear.
"You can't get in a fight in a bar, Beck. Not in here. Not in public. You know that."
Beck let himself be walked. His jaw was set and his hands were fists and Luke was right and he knew Luke was right and the door was right there.
They came through the front door and into the parking lot. The cold air hit his face. The gravel under his boots. The Range Rover twenty feet away. Luke was still holding his arm.
"Get in the truck," Luke said. "Let's just go."
The front door opened behind them. The guy had followed them out.
"Hey, asshole." The guy was in the parking lot now. Louder, braver, the bar behind him and the night air making him feel like this was his fight. "I'm talking to you."
Luke let go of Beck's arm. He stepped between them. Hands up, palms out.
"Look, man," Luke said. "We don't want trouble. Go back inside. It's done."
The guy pushed Luke. Both hands on his chest. Luke stumbled backward and caught himself on the hood of the Range Rover.
Beck lost conscious thought.
The punch landed clean. He felt the jaw in his knuckles and the wrongness in his hand at the same time. Two things arriving together. Contact and cost. The guy went down on the gravel, eyes closed, body jerking once as the nerves fired while the rest of him went to sleep.
Beck's hand was on fire. The fourth knuckle. The one that had been sore for weeks from the cage. The one attached to the hand that was supposed to swing a bat in front of the Braves in three weeks.
Brady was beside him. He glanced at Beck's hand. Then at Beck's face.
"How bad?" Brady said.
"Bad enough."
Brady closed his eyes for a second. Opened them.
He turned to the front door of the bar. Kirstin was standing there with her hand over her mouth and her eyes on Beck's hand.
Not on the guy on the gravel. On Beck's hand.
Because she understood what she was seeing even if she didn't know the details.
His throwing hand. The hand that was supposed to get him back to the show.
Brady didn't say a word to her. He just held the look.
Long enough for her to feel it. Long enough for the silence to say everything his voice didn't. The workout.
The career. The three weeks of five a.m. sessions he'd poured into that hand.
All of it sitting in the space between Brady's eyes and hers.
Then he turned back to Beck.
"Let me see it," Brady said.
"Not here."
"Beck—"
"Not here."
Addison and Morgan came through the door. Addison saw Luke leaning against the Range Rover and went straight to him. Morgan assessed the parking lot in two seconds flat.
"What happened?"
"Some idiot pushed Luke," Brady said. "Beck handled it."
Morgan turned to Beck. Then to his hand. She saw it.
"Oh, Beck," she said. "No."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. Your hand is?—"
"I said I'm fine."
He turned to Luke. "You good?"
"I'm good."
He glanced at Kirstin one more time. She was still in the doorway of the bar.
Still staring at his hand. The tears were on her face and her mouth was open and she was seeing it, all of it, the hand and the workout and the career and the thing she'd set in motion by walking into this bar tonight looking like nothing was wrong when everything was wrong.
"Can you handle this, Brady?" Beck said.
"I got it."
Beck walked to the Range Rover. His hand was throbbing. Every heartbeat pushed heat into his knuckles. He held it against his chest and got in the truck and pulled out of the lot and didn't look back.
"Ethan."
The word came out but he didn't stop. She wasn't sure he even heard it.
Morgan did.
"Don't," Morgan said. "Let him go."
Kirstin stood in the doorway of the bar. The guy was sitting up on the gravel now, holding his jaw, confused. A stranger on the ground in a parking lot on a Friday night because he'd read the room wrong and stepped into something that had nothing to do with him.
"Go home, Kirstin," Addison said. Her voice was flat. Finished. "And leave Ethan alone."
She drove herself home. The 4Runner. The island roads. The oaks in the headlights.
She unlocked the door and walked in. She didn't turn any lights on. She kicked her heels off and sat at the kitchen table. The table where Beck had told her he wanted to play and couldn't figure out how. The table where he'd cried. The table where she'd pulled him into her arms and said "I do."
The man she saw tonight was not Ethan Beck. It was someone else. And she'd created that someone else.
There weren't any tears left to cry. There wasn't anyone left to be mad at.
She'd walked into Jon's tonight like she was fine. She wasn't fine. She'd put on the dress and the heels and done her hair and walked in pretending and a man she didn't know had read her act and tried to protect her from the man she loved and gotten knocked unconscious for it.
That was on her. All of it. The stranger on the ground. Beck's hand against his chest. Brady's look. Morgan's "oh, Beck, no." The workout that might not happen now.
Her hands shook as she picked up her phone. She texted April.
I'm so lost mom. I don't know what to do anymore.
Her thumb moved to Ethan's thread. The last message was his. Two words from the week before.
I miss you.
She'd read it a hundred times.
She texted Addison and Morgan next.
I don't expect to be forgiven. Please know I'm sorry.
No reply came from either. She didn't expect one.
She set the phone on the table. She sat in the dark in the kitchen she'd rebuilt and she thought about Hudson.
His tags jingling in the middle of the night as he made his rounds through the house.
His face when she came through the door.
His tail going. The way he jumped between them on the couch, claiming them both, pressing his body against whoever was closest.
She thought about Ethan on the beach. Throwing the ball and Hudson sprinting after it with everything he had, bringing it back, dropping it at Ethan's feet, doing it again.
Over and over. And Ethan smiling the whole time.
Not the baseball smile. Not the smile for the cameras or the scouts or the table at Jerry's dinner.
The real one. The one that belonged to the beach and the dog and the woman watching from the deck.
That was the day she'd let herself think about what it might look like five or ten years from now. Hudson old or gone, unable to run anymore. But a little boy with black curls and his daddy's eyes out there instead, a glove on his hand too big for his fingers, smiling at his father across the sand.
That one hurt the worst.