Page 36

“You alright, Sullivan?” Charlie asks, as I take a very, very long sip from my drink.

“Did you know your best friend is incredibly annoying?”

“Shit, what did he say?”

“Nothing, just . . . he reminded me of something.”

“What?”

“My divorce.”

“You were talking about your divorce with Javy?”

“No, he was talking about your divorce and it reminded me of mine.”

“I thought you said the guy cheated on you?” Charlie asks, furrowing his brow. “Gemma didn’t . . . at least not that I know of.”

“No, it was more about making promises and then not keeping them.” I stop, but he tilts his head, silently asking me to continue.

“Shane and I, we had our lives, he worked in finance, I was with the Dodgers. We were, you know, doing what we set out to do, we were happy, it was what we talked about, what we said we both wanted. Putting off kids until later, if ever, climbing to the top of our careers and then, one day, he just reneged and, before I knew it, he was quitting his job and playing house.”

“So not the same, but definitely not completely different,” he says.

“Gemma wanted kids and didn’t want me to travel so much and, to this day, I really wonder if she thought I was going to quit baseball, even though she knew that it was the only thing I ever wanted.

Or maybe she realized that I wanted it more than I wanted her. ”

“That’s what Shane said. That he couldn’t compete with my job and he didn’t want to.”

“And now here we are, however many years later . . .”

“Three.”

“Ten for me,” he admits, “alone.”

“Alone, together,” I correct him, and then nod to the other table. “Three kids. Maybe four.”

He snorts. “Twenty-six of them once the season gets going, overgrown teenagers with more money than they know what to do with and more energy than I can ever remember having.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I say, raising my glass, and he clinks his beer bottle against it.

When I put my glass back down, after a much shorter sip than before, my phone lights up on the table. It’s Dan Wilson.

Done holding my client hostage?

I’m half tempted to snap a picture of the four guys at the table, laughing and having a great time after pounding a few tacos and a couple of beers each, but I manage to restrain myself.

“Someone’s getting cranky,” I say, showing my phone to Charlie.

He snorts. “Does Kai turn back into a pumpkin soon?”

“That would definitely put a dampener on contract negotiations. C’mon, let’s get him back to the plane before Wilson leaks this to a reporter that we’ll have to deal with.”

We send off our three kids in an Uber and all very deliberately turned our backs or focused on our phones while Xander and Kai’s handshake and one-armed hug went on a beat or two longer than the ones he exchanged with Cole and Archie.

Javy and Kai pick up that same conversation about developing a knuckle curve during the ride back to the airport.

“Thank you very much for today,” Kai says, slowly, clearly choosing his words carefully despite his obvious fluency. “It has given me much to consider.”

I smile at him and extend my hand for him to shake, which he does firmly. “I really appreciate your willingness to come out here today and see what our plans are, long term. And know that, no matter what you decide, you have three fans in us. If you ever need anything, you reach out, okay?”

“You work on that knuckle curve grip before Spring Training. Send me some video if you need feedback,” Javy says.

Then Kai turns to Charlie and pulls something from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Before I go, will you sign it?”

It’s a baseball card, an old one, encased in thick plastic to protect it from even the slightest wrinkle.

“Of course,” Charlie says, and I produce a pen from the recesses of my bag, while Kai unclasps the plastic gently.

With great care, Charlie scribbles his signature at the bottom of his picture, baby faced with thick stripes of eye black at the top of his cheekbones, looking as fierce as an eighteen-year-old rookie possibly can.

The card was worth a lot a moment ago and now, as Nakamura takes it back and closes the case, it’s worth even more.

“Thank you, Avery- sama ,” Kai says, staring at it, before looking up sheepishly. “Don’t tell Mr Wilson that I asked. He advised me not to.”

“Your secret’s safe with us, kid. And not just this one,” he says.

Kai freezes, looking from Charlie to Javy to me, and then back to Charlie again, before his shoulders relax and he smiles, wider and brighter than he has all day long, and that’s saying something. “I appreciate that, very much.”

“No problem, kid,” Charlie says, clapping him on the shoulder. “Now come on, we have a plane to catch.”

Once we board, Wilson shuffles his client to the other end of the plane, probably to grill him on what happened during the hours they were apart, but I won’t even let that bring me down.

Today is exactly why I got into this business, a chance to bring together players and coaches, to see them make connections and find that spark between them, the spark that ignites a team through a grueling hundred and sixty-two games and then into the post-season, keeping the flame alive until that last out.

I can see it, clear as day in front of me, the boys spilling out of the dugout at Russell Field, a dogpile on the pitcher’s mound with Charlie and Javy embracing each and every one of the players that finally got them to the pinnacle of their careers, and I’m there too, probably pacing the tunnel just beyond the dugout during the last three outs, not watching, just listening, knowing the crowd will tell me what happened and then, when that deafening final cheer goes up, I can sprint out to the field and be with them after we’ve brought a World Series home to Brooklyn, the first one since 1955.

That moment will be so sweet, beyond everything I can even imagine.

And it feels like I took one step closer to it today, but now it’s out of my hands and the only thing I can do is wait.

For a moment, one blissful moment when I hear my cell phone ring on the nightstand in Charlie’s guest room, I think that maybe, just maybe, Nakamura’s already made his decision, that he’s forgoing all the other meetings and will sign with us after we sent over our very generous offer the night before.

But then I realize it’s not even two in the morning and I’ve only been asleep for an hour and the number lighting up my phone screen definitely isn’t Dan Wilson’s or even Nakamura’s himself.

It’s Hannah Vinch.

My heart sinks into my stomach.

Stew.

I can’t think of any other reason why she’d be calling this late or even calling at all. She never has before.

“Hello? Mrs Vinch? Is . . . it Stew?”

“What?” she asks, her voice clipped and sharp on the other end of the line. “Oh, no, Stew is fine, as far as I know. Chomping at the bit to get back to work, but fine. Did I wake you?”

She knows she did.

“No, of course not,” I insist, sliding my feet out from under the covers and turning on the sconce mounted to the wall beside the headboard. “What can I do for you, Mrs Vinch?”

“You can tell me that the information I was given tonight is false.”

“Information?”

“That you didn’t stick to the presentation the ownership group approved for Kai Nakamura and that instead you flew him and his agent to Glendale on the team’s private jet to watch a minor league game?”

“Arizona Fall League,” I correct, without thinking. My brain is still sleep fogged.

“That is beside the point,” she snaps back. “Clearly we were hasty in appointing you interim general manager during Stew’s absence if you can’t even conduct yourself as a professional during a negotiation as important as the one with Kai Nakamura.”

“Did you, by any chance, speak to Daniel Wilson tonight?”

“It doesn’t matter who I spoke to.” That confirms it. “You haven’t denied it and, frankly, Ms. Sullivan, you’re trying my patience every second that ticks by.”

“We did. We . . . I,” I correct, because it was ultimately my decision, “I decided that our best chance to sign Nakamura was to show him exactly what he’d be choosing if he signs with the Eagles, who he’d be playing with, the kind of coaches that would support him, a team that will have his back during his big-league career. ”

“And you didn’t think to run any of this by anyone, not me, not Stew, you just went off on your own and made a mockery of our organization.”

“That’s not . . .”

“That’s exactly what it was. You took the prize free agent of the off season to a Desert Dogs game to eat bad ballpark food and then to a strip-mall taco place for what, two for one margaritas, blowing any chance we had to sign him out of the water?

” When she puts it like that, it doesn’t sound great.

“I won’t have it and neither will the rest of the board. ”

“But . . .”

“You’re fired, Ms Sullivan. Effective immediately.”

The phone goes dead and, with it, so goes my career.