I’m here because of my love for the game. I love the sport of baseball, more than I’ve ever loved anything else. I’m great at it, still enjoy it just as much as I did in little league, and it pays the bills handsomely. When that love dries up, which it probably never will but my body will go eventually, I’ll find something to do.
Being a businessman, rifling through numbers and spreadsheets and corporate bullshit? That is so far from anything I actually want to do. My father can wax poetic about handing me the keys to the kingdom all he wants, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to take them. We’ve only had that argument twice, each time ending in him calling me immature and not knowing what I should be building for my life after baseball.
You’d think that following the program my entire life—attending the prep school he wanted and becoming the youth poster boy for the Pistons and making every elite travel team and going to the right college and then moving up the ranks of the minors until I was a starter—would be enough to get the goddamn monkey off my back. But no dice. He still wants more blood, more of my soul.
I still can’t speak, every part of me vibrating with some kind of furious, anxious, frustrated energy.
“Now, let’s go back downstairs. Your teammates are counting on you.” Father wipes his hands together, as if cleaning us both of a mess he never wanted to deal with in the first place.
Talk about laying down the law before I even step over the line. That’s my Daniel Callahan, though, always one to nip it in the bud.
I follow him out, clutching a piece of paper in my right fist. He may have taken my promise at face value, but he neglected to see the sleight of hand I was pulling.
Because I found a condo brochure for a nearby Pennsylvania town in my cousin’s drawer. And now I won’t stop until I got to see Hannah with my own two eyes.
5
Hannah
The girls, Dahlia, and I are just finishing up dinner when the doorbell rings.
My blood runs cold at the sound, and Noelle looks up at me, spaghetti sauce dotting her cheeks, chin, and shirt.
“Who’s here, Mommy?” my five-year-old asks.
I try to keep the panic out of my eyes as they flit to Dahlia, who is now half-standing and half-sitting in her threadbare white kitchen chair.
“Could just be a package. Or maybe a neighbor.” Dahlia is trying to calm me, but my heart is already in my throat and sweat trickles down my spine.
Trying to take one deep, calming breath, I move to the front hallway. Calling over my shoulder, I try to convey how serious I am to my sister in one look.
“I’ll just go check.” My tone is airy, for the girl’s sake, but my glare says, if it’s Shane, hide them.
With each step toward the plain front door with its, thank God, peephole, my breath becomes more and more ragged. I could very well be walking into a trap, into a fight, into another beating. Flashes from that night come back to me in pixelated, blurry memories, and I steady my hand against the front door and try to breathe.
But when I finally collect myself enough to look through the peephole, relief floods me like a tsunami. I unlock it hastily and step out onto the front porch.
“Walker, my goodness, I’m relieved it’s you ringing that bell.”
The six-foot-five bronzed god standing in front of me, holding a bouquet of daisies, blinks down at me with confused, but gorgeous, sapphire blue eyes.
It’s hard to stand in Walker Callahan’s presence and not stare. The man is a literal centerfold, one of those beautiful people you expect to see riding a horse in a Ralph Lauren ad or modeling underwear in some exotic cologne commercial.
He’s so tall that I have to crane my neck, and when I do, I’m hit with the most dazzling gaze I’ve ever seen. Cerulean blue mixed with seafoam green, his irises are like the waters of Hawaii. As a shortstop, Walker is built for speed and strength rather than the stocky build of my husband. His arms are ropey and lean in a simple teal T-shirt, and the way his jeans mold to his sculpted thighs is pulling my eyeline down way too quickly.
But what draws women the most to Walker, I’m sure since I personally wouldn’t know, is his aura, if you will. There is something effortlessly charming and intriguing about the man, like you want to pull back the layers and nestle you and only you in between them.
“Oh, crap, I’m sorry, I didn’t even realize that it would probably alarm you to show up unannounced. But I don’t have your new number, and …” he trails off, and I realize that he’s looking me up and down.
Shame burns my cheeks as I realize I enjoy him checking me out. “It’s all right, I just … things have been very chaotic here. As you can imagine.”
Walker nods, and I can’t stop staring at those ocean blue eyes. “That’s why I wanted to come see you.”
“How did you … did Colleen tell you I was here?” I question, not mad but just curious.
Not that I care if Walker knows where I’m living, but I don’t need Colleen providing that information to just anyone. Especially since I know there are probably teammates of Shane’s who are on his side in this entire thing.
Walker rubs the back of his neck, a guilty expression on his face. “Well, you see, not exactly. She wouldn’t fill me in on the way to find you, and I just … I had to see you were okay with my own two eyes.”
He looks so worried and sheepish at the same time, that I don’t even feel my hackles rise. So, he found some alternate way of figuring out where I was. Am I surprised that anyone could do that, with enough digging? Probably not. But it does sound the bells in the back of my head warning me that Shane could always take that route, too.
“Now you see me.” I shrug, realizing that the end of that cliché is, and now you don’t.
How close had I come to not being seen anymore? It’s one of the questions that plagues me late into the night. There was a very real possibility, if this never went public, that at some point, I would have ended up dead. Unseeable to all of those around me.
“You look good … better.” Walker looks like he might reach out and touch me, and my entire body goes rigid. His hand drops in midair, as we both register that I just flinched at the thought of a man touching me. “Not to say you don’t always look good. You’re …”
This conversation gets more awkward by the second, and now not only has he tried to touch me, but I’m pretty sure that would have been a compliment if he hadn’t cut himself off.
Something between us changed during that ambulance ride, where he held my hand and pressed his forehead to mine the entire way. I’d curled into him, as if he was the only lifeline I had in the entire world.
“Thank you.” I don’t know what more to say.
“How are you feeling? How are the girls?” Walker seems to change directions.
The night is cooling down fast for Pennsylvania in November. I wrap my arms around myself, both because my bones are chilling and because being in such close proximity to Walker is giving me goose bumps.
“We’re okay. The girls had their first solo visit the other day with Sh … their father. It was difficult.” Then a thought strikes me. “Oh, God, I didn’t even say congratulations. The series. It must have been amazing.”