When the team doctor leaves to fill out the paperwork, I walk back out to the dugout. The game is over—we lost 5-2—and the field is emptying.
I sit on the wooden bench, my right arm wrapped in a massive, ridiculous mountain of ice and plastic wrap. I stare out at the manicured grass of the infield, the grounds crew already at work with rakes and those little vacuums they use to suck up our seed shells. The air is still hot, but I feel completely frozen. Everything was finally clicking into place—my family, Campbell, my swing, my future. And in a split second, the game just reached out and ripped the floor out from under me.
My dad’s lumbering footsteps echo on the concrete as he walks down the dugout steps. He doesn’t say anything at first. He just sits down next to me on the bench, his long legsstretching out toward the warning track. He caught the rest of the game tonight. We still couldn’t win.
“It feels like the end of the world, doesn’t it?” he says softly, staring out at the pitcher’s mound.
“Yeah,” I choke out, my throat tight, my eyes burning with a hot, angry frustration I can’t check. I run my forearm over my face. “It does.”
“I missed two months of my rookie year with the same damn thing,” he continues, shifting his weight so he’s looking at me. I glance in his direction but my gaze drifts back out to the tiny bugs hovering over the blades of grass. “I thought the front office was going to trade me to Iowa for a bucket of balls. I spent three weeks sitting on a training table watching some kid from California hit thirty-five points higher than me.”
He reaches over, his hand resting on the back of my neck, his fingers squeezing the tight muscles there. “But you know what I did, Jake? I learned how to read a pitcher’s tip from the bench. I learned how to call a game by watching the hitters’ feet from the dugout. You aren’t disappearing. You’re just moving to the classroom for a minute. And when you get back, you’re going to be twice as dangerous.”
I don’t look at him, but the heavy, suffocating weight in my chest lifts a fraction. I let out a long, shaky breath, nodding. “Thanks, Dad.”
The team bus back to the hotel is a quiet vault of exhausted players, the low hum of the engine the only constant sound against the dark highway. I sit in my row, my phone glowing in my left hand, staring at the text thread with Campbell. My shoulder is now a dull ache. The real pain is the hollow feeling in my gut.
JAKE: Doc shut me down. Severe inflammation. 2-3 weeks minimum, no catching, no throwing.
Her response is almost instantaneous, the ellipses dancing on the screen before I can lock my phone.
CAMPBELL: FaceTiming you the second you get to your room. Don’t you dare go to sleep.
My mouth inches up for a brief second before I tuck my phone away. She must be tracking my location. She’s watching me from afar. It feels nice.
When I finally click the keycard into my hotel room door, I barely have time to toss my duffel onto the floor before my phone buzzes with a video call. I slide into the lone armchair by the window, propping the phone against the ice bucket on the desk, and hit accept.
Campbell’s face fills the screen. She’s at my apartment—our apartment—sitting at the small kitchen counter with her hair pulled up in a messy bun, wearing the same oversized T-shirt she stole from me this morning. I think she’s commandeered six of them by now. Her dark eyes are wide, scanning my face through the camera with her usual intensity. Her gaze softens the moment she focuses on my face.
“Get comfortable, McKinney,” she commands, her voice crisp but kind, the way an elementary teacher rounds up a group of kids from recess. “Take off your shirt, put the real ice pack on that shoulder, and lie down on the bed. Right now.”
“Campbell, I’m fine?—”
“You are currently veering into a deep, dark hole of self-pity, and I am not letting you spend the night wallowing in aMarriott,” she says, her fingers clicking rapidly against her keyboard off-screen.
“Roadway Inn,” I correct.
She waves a hand at me. “Whatever. In the time it took you to ride that bus, I built a twelve-slide media and personal development framework for this exact scenario. Turn the phone sideways so you can see my screen.”
I let out an incredulous laugh, but do exactly what she says. I shed my shirt, grab the bag of hotel ice, and lie on my side on the king-sized bed, propping the phone on a spare pillow.
The screen splits, and suddenly I’m looking at a slick, professional presentation titled:JAKE MCKINNEY: THE IL STRATEGY & BRAND INTEGRITY ALLIANCE.
“Are you serious right now?” I mutter, staring at the screen. “You made a slide deck for my busted shoulder?”
“I am a public relations strategist, Jake. I don’t cry; I reframe.”
Her face appears in a small bubble in the corner. She clicks to the first slide, which features a bulleted list under the heading:THE VALUE OF INTEGRITY.
“Highlight number one: personal integrity. By coming clean about the injury instead of trying to play through it and hurting the team, you are demonstrating long-term asset management and high organizational leadership.”
I let out a loud scoff, staring at the ceiling. “Asset management? Campbell, I’m a baseball player, not a tech startup. The scouts don’t give a shit about my leadership if I can’t throw a guy out at second.”
“They care about your longevity, Jake,” she fires back, her tone shifting to the stubborn woman who stood up to my aunt over a plate of brisket. “A player who knows his limits and protects his body has a ten-year career. A playerwho hides a torn bursa because he’s too proud to sit down gets released before his twenty-sixth birthday. This is part of your brand now. The honest, hard-working, gritty McKinney legacy. We feed this to the local reporters tomorrow. ‘Jake McKinney prioritizes team success over personal stats.’ It’s a gold mine.”
I look back at the screen, watching her eyes spark with that rebellious fire that got me in trouble in the first place. She’s something special when she gets like this. The sheer absurdity of it—she’s using her multi-thousand-dollar corporate brain to protect my stupid minor-league contract—makes the pulsing ache in my temples subside completely.
“Next slide,” she continues, her voice dropping into a softer, lower register that makes my chest tighten in a completely different way. “The rehabilitation phase includes daily targeted physical therapy, an optimized nutritional profile, and . . . mandatory nightly massages the second you get back home.”
