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ME

At what age did you stop believing in Santa?

DANAE

I never believed in Santa.

ME

Seriously?!

DANAE

My parents never did Santa. They were too serious about everything to engage in something so impractical. And they probably wanted the credit for the gifts they gave me.

ME

That’s seriously sad.

DANAE

ME

Did you get lost? No questionfor me today?

DANAE

Oh, ummm, what’s your favorite color?

ME

Green. Specifically the shade of your eyes. That I’m counting down the days till I get to see again.

When Danae hasn’t responded to my flirty text after fifteen minutes, I hit the call button. I need to be on the team bus to the stadium in ten minutes, but I’m going to use all ten of those minutes getting to the bottom of why Danae has been acting so weird the past week.

There was another minor incident with the press, which could be to blame. Someone managed to get a photo of Danae and Jason watching a game in the suite and sold it to a tabloid. The basic facts of Jason’s adoption case were dredged back up—which made it easy to get the article taken down in under twenty-four hours. Still, I know it spooked Danae all over again with the adoption hearing approaching, despite reassurance from Jason’s social worker that it wouldn’t be held against her.

She was evasive most of the week I was in KC for our two series at home and quieter than usual the one time I did see her. She said she didn’t want to risk rocking the media boat by coming to any home games again until after the adoption is finalized, which I completely understood. Still, it killed me not to have her and Jason there. Their absence combined with her acting so cagey has me second-guessing everything about myself and our situation.

We’re in the middle of a ten-day stretch of away games, in the middle of a seventeen-day stretch of daily games. For the first time in my life, I’m cursing the man who decided that baseball should be a 162-game season. Connecting with Danae has felt next to impossible with her cold shoulder on top of my packed schedule. She doesn’t know that I got special permission to miss a game so that Sam and I can fly home after tonight’s game in order to be there for the court hearing tomorrow. I still want to maintain the surprise, but it’s time to cut to the chase of what’s behind her mood. I can’t take it anymore.

The call goes to voicemail, so I immediately dial her again.

“Hello?” she answers, sounding annoyed.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she answers.

“There’s an ‘everything’ behind that ‘nothing’ if there ever was one,” I say. “Babe, you’ve been acting closed off ever since the morning after we fell asleep on the couch together. Are you upset about that for some reason? Or upset with me for setting Jason off that day by calling him the wrong name?”

“No, it’s not that,” she says, voice exasperated.

“Ha! So it issomething,” I say. She audibly huffs. “Danae, please open the window to the thought factory. I can’t figure out what’s going on when I can’t see you.”

“How long until you retire from baseball?” she asks. Her sudden assertiveness catches me off guard.