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FRANCESCA

Two years later . . .

I speak four languages with varying degrees of fluency.

English was my first, spoken at home with my parents, and I was surrounded by it in my suburban Los Angeles neighborhood growing up.

Spanish was my next, a slow slog during middle and high school, with a few classmates who could speak it better than our teachers, and then way more vigorous study in college, which got me to conversational level.

My third, after a few classes in college, is Japanese.

I am in a constant battle with it in my Duolingo app.

The app is mostly winning.

Which is why I don’t really understand the people around me in the Tokyo Dome. At least I don’t understand their words.

But I do understand another language, my fourth, and one I share with everyone in this stadium tonight.

Baseball.

The crack of the bat and the smell of the dirt or the leather of a glove, the rhythm of the game – building, always building to something – is so deeply ingrained in my soul that I most definitely speak the same language as the other fifty-five thousand people packed into the stands for the final game of the Japan Series as Kai Nakamura, the ace of the Yomiuri Giants, stands alone in the center of the diamond.

Ninth inning.

Two outs.

Nobody on.

Two strikes on the batter.

I’ve been here before, on the other side of it.

The Giants are up one to nothing, but it might as well be five or ten or a hundred runs.

The other team hasn’t reached base, not once. Not hits, no walks, not even a fielding error or a hit by pitch.

A swing and a miss.

Strike three.

Sutoraikusurī , in Japanese.

And that collective inhale explodes into a roar that I understand perfectly.

Baseball isn’t my first language, but it is the one I’m most fluent in.

I can’t help it – my gaze drifts across the field, past the delirium of the victors, to look in the visitor’s dugout, where I see a team that has just been dominated by the best pitcher in their league.

Their season is over, with nothing to show for it but their memories, tarnished by this final one of watching another team celebrate the championship they’ve coveted all year long.

That feeling? That’s one I know better than most.

And it’s enough to remind me of someone who knows it as well as I do, back in Los Angeles, where we parted on a night a lot like tonight – an unexpected bonding moment, the bittersweet ending of a career and an unexpected kiss that I sometimes still relive with startling clarity.

“Sullivan- sama ,” a stadium worker says, interrupting me before the memories take over. And I’m back in the Tokyo Dome, rather than more than five thousand miles away and two years ago at Dodger Stadium. “Sullivan- sama , your car is here for the airport.”

My flight isn’t back to Los Angeles, but to New York, to my new team: the Brooklyn Eagles, the team that had replaced the Dodgers when they left for the West Coast in 1957.

As their assistant general manager, I’m going to help make sure next year finally comes.

And Kai Nakamura is the arm we’ll ride all the way to the World Series.

I don’t stay for the celebration.

He knows I was there. I was right behind home plate for the whole game. The cheeky kid even had the audacity to tip his cap in my direction before the first pitch. He’ll want to celebrate with his teammates, enjoy his championship, but, in a few weeks, when he’s ready, that will be my moment.

Until then, I’ve got work to do.

Conventional wisdom would be to sleep through most of my nearly thirteen-hour flight.

There isn’t a lot of business getting done quite yet, just a week after the World Series.

Most people who work in the league are taking a day or two to regroup before they evaluate their season and start executing their plans for the next one.

But I’m not going to wait. So, instead of sleeping, I’m bolt upright with a coffee cup that the flight attendant in first class never allows to get below half empty, working on my pitch for Stew.

Stew, whose real name isn’t Stew or Stewart, but who picked up the nickname during his playing days, where he went on a hot streak and only ate stew for four weeks, until his bat went cold, is the general manager and vice president of the Brooklyn Eagles and, more to the point, my direct boss.

My only boss, really.

When he brought me on last year, the Eagles were dead last, not just last in their division, but held the actual worst record in baseball. A disgrace by any measure, but, in New York, it was wildly unacceptable.

Last season the goal wasn’t to win it all.

It couldn’t be.

Worst to first stories might work great in fiction, but they almost never happen in real life.

In real life, you have to scrape and claw your way from of the bottom, and last season we made moves.

But, to get the team to the next level, we’ll have to really take a good hard look at who and what we want to be in the coming years.

Which means my pitch to Stew has to be perfect if I’m going to talk him into the massive amounts of money he’ll have to pry out of the tightly clenched bank account of our ownership group to get the deal done.

Millions of dollars.

Tens of millions, just for the right to sign him.

Hundreds to lock him up for the next decade.

The kid is worth it. Now I just have to convince everyone else.

And I won’t be alone.

Every team is going to be gunning for Nakamura, but my real competition is clear. It’ll be the Yankees and the Dodgers. New York and LA . Other teams will express interest, to make their fanbases happy, but ultimately the deal will be too rich for them.

The Eagles are usually one of those teams.

But they won’t be on my watch.

So, it’s more coffee and dozens of spreadsheets analyzing data from Nakamura and his opponents, his injury history – hell, even his social media activity – and comparing all of it to what his production might be in the major leagues, and then feeding all of it into the algorithm I designed myself in order to have it predict the most likely outcome for his tenure.

Every single time, no matter what I enter in for variables, my results are the same.

He’s just that good.

After my analysis is complete, I’m back into my files, making notes about Japanese customs. I’ve worked on signing free agents from there before, but I need to make sure I’m as well versed as possible.

Particularly regarding how to walk the fine line of courting someone’s business: what’s too passive, what’s too aggressive, things that will convey respect and others that will risk giving offense.

Kai Nakamura is going to dominate Major League Baseball.

And I’m going to make sure he dominates for the Brooklyn Eagles.

When the plane touches down at JFK , I’ve consumed enough coffee to make my skin feel like my soul is vibrating inside of it, but the analysis is complete, and my pitch is written, edited and fine-tuned, and I’m absolutely ready to do what I need to do when I see Stew later today.

I’ll just head straight to the ballpark and grab a shower in my office (I negotiated that into my contract when they were desperate to lure me away from the Dodgers and they had absolutely no idea I wanted out maybe even more than they wanted me here).

And once I don’t smell like an increasingly dire combination of ballpark, airplane and terrible coffee, I’ll be ready just as Stew swings into his office.

I can pitch him right here and now and get the gears into motion before anyone else.

Accepting my coat from the flight attendant, who is still clearly horrified about the amount of caffeine I’ve consumed in the last half a day, I deplane briskly and head straight out to the car that will be waiting for me.

I catch a glimpse of myself, ever so briefly, in the glass of the automatic doors just before they open to the sharp chill of November air and, cringing just slightly, I pull my hair, a bit matted and slightly greasy, onto the top of my head in a messy blonde bun.

My neck protests as I lower my arms – creaky joints were inevitable, no matter how comfortable the seats are in first class.

One of the many joys of simply existing after the age of thirty.

Another is the ache in my feet. I was able to take my shoes off on the plane for a while, but now the pinch in my toes is making itself known as I balance on the heels I wear despite my height, or maybe in spite of it.

Who says tall girls can’t wear heels?

Not Francesca Sullivan.

And if it gives me the advantage of bringing me up to eye level or above with the men I constantly come up against in an industry they dominate, they’ll just have to deal with it.

Stretching my neck, I peer over the heads of the people hovering near the curb waiting for their rides to pull up. The team will have sent a car, probably Vladimir, one of our regular drivers.

Holding tight to the handle of my suitcase, I spot him a few yards away, my last name written on a white card with a tiny Eagles logo at the top in the passenger window.

But before I reach it, a man and a woman with several large suitcases and a baby in a carrier approach the car, waving it down.

Vladimir makes eye contact with me, but stops the car to avoid running over the family.

They must be confused.

Maybe they’re tourists, thinking the car is a cab to flag down, or maybe they have the same last name as I do. Sullivan isn’t exactly rare . . . My mind tries to calculate the odds of that while I stride toward the car, when something else clicks in her head.

The man . . . I know him.

And, yes, we do share a name.

. . . Sullivan.

My ex-husband.

And his wife.

And their baby.

The odds of that are even worse, hundreds of thousands of times worse.

Unfortunately, my brain is too busy reeling to focus on stopping my feet. I just catch the last of Vladimir’s protests that they aren’t the Sullivans he’s supposed to be picking up as he motions toward me.