A cold shudder ran over me then as it does now.
Maybe it’s bizarre to have felt discarded when I had so much attention on me throughout my life. It wasn’t me that was discarded—it was my wishes. My choices.
I never wanted to play pro baseball.
The realization is a snowball in the face.
I never wanted to play it, but I did, anyway. Did Granddad know? Could he sense that this was all done out of duty, not the same love and drive he had for the game?
Did he resent me for being better than him all along?
Yes.
The truth washes over me like hot water in an ice bath—shocking, but in the best way. Relief floods me, loosening muscles I didn’t know I’d been tensing for years.
It wasn’t about me. It was never about me.
I wasn’t too weak or too soft or too emotional. I wasn’t a disappointment because I failed.
I was a threat because I succeeded.
Suddenly, every cruel word, every dismissive look, every comparison makes sense. He wasn’t trying to make me better, not fully. He was trying to keep me smaller than him. Because if I could ever accept that I’d arrived—really, truly arrived—it would threaten not just his image, but his legacy.
The weight I’ve been carrying for years lifts enough that I can breathe. I suck in frozen air and it sears my lungs, a clean burn purging me of everything Granddad has dumped there.
I think about Poppy, her annoyed face as she exclaimed,“You literally made it!”
She didn’t say it like I should be proud, but like I should stop being so stupid about it, already.
She was exactly right.
Yeah, I got injured, but I made it to the show. I had my signing day. I made the roster.
I made it.
Granddad’s already reached his car at the far end of the lot, where Dad and Mom are standing, shivering in the cold. It hurts that they’ll never be the ones to stand up for me, but this shame is a cancer, and I need it gone.
“You’re jealous,” I say, the words tearing out of me before I can stop them. My voice cracks the air like a ball shattering a bat.
Granddad stops. Slowly, his hand drops from the car door handle. “Of what?” he calls back, that mocking lilt still in his voice. “Why would I be jealous of you?”
“Because you’ll never know if you had what it took.” My pulse is pounding so loud I barely hear myself. “All these years, you’ve acted like I was the failure, but the truth is you don’t know if you were ever good enough. You never got your shot. I did.”
He turns, that frozen half-smile already spreading. “You call one at bat a shot?”
“It wasn’t one at bat. It was a contract. A jersey. My name on a major league roster?—”
“That you lost because you weren’t mentally tough enough!”
“—that Iearnedbecause I was. Mentally and physically. It’s everything you never had. And you want to know the craziest part? I like coaching a hundred times more than I ever liked playing.”
“Of course you do. Those who can’t do, teach,” he says with a sneer.
The snow picks up again, swirling around the parking lot lights like dust in a spotlight. My breath fogs the air between us in short, hard puffs.
“But Granddad, didn’t you tell ESPN that you were my ‘personal coach’? You remember the interview on signing day, don’t you? When they asked what my success meant to you, and you said it was a validation of everythingyoutaught me over the years?”
His eyes sharpen like he knows he’s cornered.
