Nate Gallagher says it to a man in a worn leather jacket standing on his baseball field with a press badge and a notebook, while Leo Hart, his star pitcher, backs toward the dugout, opening and closing the webbing of his glove like he is trying to catch something invisible.
Connor Walsh writes for the Hollow Creek Gazette. He has a press pass, a release form signed by the district superintendent, and a notebook full of numbers: Leo's ERA down nearly a full point since last spring, a cleanup hitter batting .412 after hitting .289 the year before. He wants the season feature. Nate wants him off the field.
Nate does not get a veto. The principal who signed off on the access is Maya Kowalski, his sister, who has spent her whole life trusting people first and checking afterwards.
What Connor eventually finds is not a training program.
It is a pitcher who says throwing hard feels like *a rubber band inside me that's about to snap*, and whose father says he is faking. It is an assistant coach, Derek Chen, crew-cut and permanently smirking, who has already worked out that the school promotes from within. And it is a name Nate has not spoken aloud in more than a decade.
*Jamie Tran.* A second baseman with the fastest hands Nate ever saw. He was assaulted outside a bar on Willamette Street and did not survive it, and Nate packed his clothes into boxes because Jamie's mother was too broken to do it, and then built an entire life on never saying what Jamie had been to him.
When the team bus dies on the way to a game, Connor offers a trade in front of a busload of teenagers: *One honest answer. Then I make the call.*
After that come photographs, a resignation letter on a desk, and a school board that is going to hear about all of it.
A closed-door MM sports romance set around a small-town high-school baseball program, about grief carried in silence, a reporter who will not settle for the easy story, and a man deciding whether he intends to keep quiet for the rest of his life.
