Page 82 of The Art of Catching Feelings

Daphne tried to respond, but she only ended up crying again. To her credit, Kim didn’t ask any more questions for a few minutes. She just kicked off her shoes and climbed into bed with Daphne, holding her until the last of her sobs died down.

“Have you been hydrating?” Kim said. “Because I think that was most of your seventy percent.”

Daphne let out a choked laugh, gesturing toward an untouched glass of water on her nightstand. “I’ve been meaning to.”

Kim grabbed the glass and dumped the remainder of it in Milo’s water bowl, then refilled it before handing it back to Daphne. “Nice and fresh,” she said. “Take a few big sips for me and then tell me everything.”

Daphne followed her friend’s directions, and if Kim hit her with anI told you so, well…she knew she’d earned it. Kim had warned her from the beginning that none of this would end well—not chatting anonymously with Chris over DMs and texts, not hooking up with him in real life, none of it. But Kim just listened, wincing at a few of the worst parts and rubbing Daphne’s knee sympathetically when she got to the end.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

“Do?”Daphne blinked in genuine confusion. “There’s nothing for metodo. It all blew up. He made his feelings perfectly clear.”

“But did you explain? How it was all an accident at first, why you didn’t tell him later?”

She’d tried to explain. She didn’t know how coherent it had all been, or how much of it he’d heard. But she also knew that there was no explanation, no excuse that would negate what she’d done. Shehadlied to him. That part was undeniable.

“You didn’t see the way he looked at me,” Daphne said.

“Well, what are you going to do about the job? You can’t show up every day and interview him like nothing happened. It’ll be too painful. It’ll be impossible.”

Daphne buried her face in her hands, jamming the heels of her hands against her swollen eyes. She was so tired. She never wanted to think about walking into that ballpark again, never wanted to have to put on makeup and smile and ask surface-level questions about a specific play. But at the same time, she knew she couldn’t quit. It would leave the team in the lurch and be a real shit move to do to Layla, who hadn’t had to advocate for Daphne in the first place but who had, trying to support her every step of the way. Not only that, but she knew she couldn’t quit forherself. This was something she needed to see through.

“I’ll take it one day at a time,” Daphne said. It wasn’t lost on her that it was the very same sound bite players were always giving her.One pitch at a time. Three outs to end the game.Tunnel vision.

Kim was silent for a few minutes, just rubbing Daphne’s back. “I still think you should try to talk to him again,” she said. “When he’s calmed down. It sounds like he really cared about you.”

She knew what her friend meant, but that past tense still hither right where she most hurt.Whatever we were to each other, Chris had said. She’d told him she loved him, and he’d said the words were empty, that he didn’t know her at all.

The problem was that Chrishadcared about her. She didn’t know if she’d even appreciated how much, if she’d allowed herself to feel it. Maybe she could only feel it now because of its stark absence, the way that the clouds came out to cover the sky, and all of a sudden you missed the sun.

—

Chris had told her that there was a new energy among the team, the first game back after the All-Star break. It was only three days, but when you were used to grinding the way they did six days a week, afternoon games, night games, doubleheaders, road trips, press events, fan events…those three days meant a lot. And there was always a renewed hope, he’d said. Like even though your record still carried over into the second part of the season, you could imagine certain slates wiped clean if you wanted to, a chance to have a new start.

Daphne didn’t feel any of that. And from what she could tell, unfortunately Chris didn’t, either.

The Battery were up by one in the seventh inning when the opposing team hit what should have been an easy grab at third base, thrown across to get the out at first. Daphne had seen Chris make the play a thousand times. It was one of her favorites to watch, actually, because it was basic enough that she didn’t really sweat it, didn’t feel her adrenaline spike as the ball headed toward him. He always fielded it cleanly. And then sometimes he held on to it for a second—it wouldfeellike a second too long to her, she’d start to sweat it then, wondering if he’d be able to make the throw in time—or sometimes he had to throw right away, on the run or twisting his body, slinging the ball over to first in this straightspear that she could hear from her place by the dugout hit the first baseman’s glove with a satisfyingthwack.

It was during those kinds of moments when she thought,I like baseball, actually. There was a rhythm to it, a flow. And she watched Chris make that same play over and over enough that she could see there were nuances to it, too.I think Chris would like Mary Oliver, she’d thought once, a thought which had seemed to come out of nowhere, but which she understood more as she watched him play. How could you not be poetic about baseball?

But this time, the ball came right toward Chris, and he put his glove down, ready to make the same casual pickup he’d done so many times before, and instead the ball just skipped right off the end of his glove. There was an awful moment, where he obviously thought he already had it, reaching in to make the throw. When he realized he didn’t, he spun around, looking for the ball on the grass.

“Come on,” Daphne whispered. “Come on, come on.”

There was still time to make the throw. The runner was still not quite to first base—it would be tight, but there was time. Chris finally scooped up the ball, turning to throw it almost over his shoulder, the ball landing with a bounce in front of the first baseman’s outstretched glove and rolling all the way out to foul territory. By the time it was over, New York had scored to tie the game, and Chris had been charged with two errors on the same play.

“That’s a rare one,” one of the photographers muttered from behind her. “What’s with him?”

Daphne knew it was a rhetorical question, so she didn’t bother to answer. But it wasn’t lost on her that she was maybe the only person in that entire stadium who knewexactlywhat was wrong with him, ranging from everything he’d told her to everything she’d done. When the inning was over, she watched as he cameinto the dugout, completely stone-faced, tossing his glove into the garbage can before disappearing down the steps into the clubhouse.

“Did he just—” the photographer asked, and this time Daphne knew the questionwasdirected toward her.

“Yeah,” she said. “He did.”

—

Any minute, Daphne had expected to get a note for an update to announce, something about how third baseman Chris Kepler had been replaced on the field, or even that Chris Kepler had been taken out of the game on some injury pretext. But it never came, and by the top of the eighth inning he was back out there again with another glove to finish the game. She should’ve known that wasn’t his style, to just leave like that. At least not when it came to his job. With her, he’d leftexactlylike that.

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