“Evan—”
Evan held up a hand, palm out in the universal sign for stop. His voice was deadly calm and quiet. “Don’t.” He opened the door and paused, hand on the knob. Without turning around, hespoke again. “One day, you’re gonna wake up and realize that you’re alone because you were trying too hard to control things. That’s not living. It’s hiding.”
The door clicked shut behind him, and CJ sat on the edge of his bed, palm pressed to his chest like he could hold his heart together from the outside. He’d chosen the only thing that had always been the same. Ninety feet, three outs, and rules that didn’t change.
It would have to be enough.
1
EVAN
Seven YearsLater
After a season that had been dead in the water since early September, clean-out day for the Barracudas should have been subdued. Instead, Pacific Horizon Park’s clubhouse had become a shipping center, filled with the snap of tape guns, the squeak of markers, and the occasionalthunkof a bat getting dropped into a wardrobe case. Another losing season packed away and ready to be shipped to someone’s storage unit.
Their season had been over for almost three weeks, but some of the guys were still trying to make it last by making an afternoon of it, hanging around because they weren’t ready for their break to start. A speaker was set on low, playing the kind of classic rock you could hum along to without needing to use your brain, and laughter came in short bursts from different corners of the room. Other major league teams held their clean-out day and exit interviews a day or two after their last game, but the Barracudas’ management pushed it out to the end of the month. Some of the guys liked the break before they had to clean out their lockers. Evan was not one of them. All the break did was delay the true start of the off-season.
He’d come in at the end of the day, hoping most of the guys would already be gone and he could get in and out without the forced nostalgia. His side of the room had already been stripped bare. The gear was gone, a handful of forgotten training room towels still hung on hooks, and nameplates had been tossed carelessly onto benches. Evan always took his nameplate down last. He wasn’t superstitious about it, but it felt wrong somehow to rip your name off your locker before you’d taken the last of your life out of it.
He’d dressed for the task in dark jeans, a black T-shirt softened by too many washes, and a pair of well-worn white high-top sneakers. They made almost no sound against the stadium floors, which was a strange contrast to the familiar click of cleats on concrete that had followed him around for the last seven months. Not wearing his uniform also felt weird. Instead of a stiff jersey and gear pulling across his shoulders, it was just the stretch of cotton and denim as he reached into his locker to gather the things that added up to a season: a spare mask strap, a catcher’s mitt, three mismatched batting gloves, and a lucky wristband he used to believe in.
“Yo, D,” called Rizzo from across the room. He was the team’s designated hitter, the backup first baseman, and a serial optimist, with hair already sun-streaked like he’d been living at the beach since mid-September. Maybe he had. “Arizona in January. Golf trip. I got a house. Four bedrooms and an inflatable dinosaur for the pool.”
“I don’t golf,” Evan said without looking up.
“You say that every year, and then you drink two beers and try to fix your swing at midnight with a YouTube video.”
“That’s slander,” Evan said, smiling despite his sour mood. He stuffed a cracked helmet into the equipment bin and tugged at the tape on his nameplate. “Text me the dates.”
“Already did,” Rizzo said with a dimpled grin. “Also sent you a TikTok of a guy chipping off a roof onto a trampoline.”
“Valuable film study.”
Rizzo gave him finger guns before drifting off toward a cluster of pitchers arguing about whether to splurge on Cabo or split the difference with Palm Springs. Evan chuckled when Rizzo treated them like they were insane to consider anything other than Cabo.
Around him, the room thinned. The bullpen coach gave a last slap to the back of one of his pitchers. The equipment staff rolled a rack of jerseys toward the laundry, logo patches winking under the fluorescent lights. Two rookies posed for a photo, heads tipped together, their faces lit with the kind of excitement that came with surviving your first year in the Show.
He peeled the last stubborn bit of tape from his nameplate and slid the thin plastic rectangle into his duffel. Most of his teammates thought it was strange that he kept them, and Evan couldn’t give them a good reason for why he did. But he still had every nameplate he’d ever been given, going all the way back to childhood. They were tucked away in a shoebox at home, stacked in chronological order: travel ball, middle school, high school, college, two years in the minors, and now five years in the majors. He wasn’t sentimental about much, but for some reason, he’d never been able to throw them away.
Maybe because seasons disappeared so quickly. One moment, they consumed your entire life, and the next, they were nothing but a box of memories in a closet. End-of-season rituals mattered, even if he couldn’t explain why.
On his way out, Evan drifted toward the trainers’ room, where the faint minty scent of pain-relieving gel hung permanently in the air.
“You want to keep these?” He tilted a tote bag filled with leftover pieces of the season toward Marco, the head trainer.
Marco shook his head without looking at the contents. “Throw them in the trash.”
“Got it,” Evan said with a smile. He tossed the bag in the trash and gave Marco a fist bump. “Thanks for keeping me glued together.”
“Anytime. Try to stay in one piece between now and February.”
“No promises.”
The tunnel to the players’ lot was quieter than it ever was, except in the winter when the stadium seemed to loom over the city like a sleeping giant. Without the crowd noise from the stands ricocheting off the concrete, the space was too open and uncomfortable. Evan could hear every sound—from the distant hum of a floor buffer to the almost silent slap of his sneakers against the floor as he headed to his car.
During the season, the noise was constant, and it kept his mind occupied, drowning out the things he didn’t want to think about. But in the off-season, when the noise was silenced and the energy was drained from the building, he couldn’t avoid it. The months ahead stretched out in front of him, and there was nowhere to hide from the things he avoided during the season.
The weather in San Diego was consistently beautiful and the late-October afternoon could have belonged to summer. The stone and steel of the ballpark glowed honey in the slanting light of the setting sun. A breeze blew up from the bay, cool enough to raise the hair on his arms but warm enough to make him feel ridiculous for even registering it. Jacaranda trees lined the walkway to the parking lot, throwing soft, flowery shadows on the blacktop. Outside the fence, kids from the neighborhood rolled past on scooters, laughter tapering off as they sped away.
