Stealing Home (Callahan Family #2) - Carrie Aarons Page 0,3

once bringing home a ring and another time losing in hellacious fashion. These press junkets and schmoozing events leading up to the seven most important games played in a major league season are supposed to be fun. Competitive. Mostly light-hearted.

Just the same as each time I’ve been here, the Packton Pistons field has been transformed into a midway at a carnival, of sorts. There are sponsor tents everywhere, sports equipment companies, and energy drink manufacturers, and different media outlets all hocking their products. Fans mill about in a specific section, and I can already hear the rowdy ones getting drunker as the afternoon trudges on.

And above it all, the stadium I grew up in and have come to love like another family member, looms large. I can make out the retired numbers of all-star Pistons players from where they’re enshrined on the outfield wall, and my heart thumps a beat. To everyone else, this feels like the same song and dance from World Series’ before.

This media week, though, feels nothing like my media weeks of the past.

The amount of times I’ve been asked about the Shane Giraldi charges is astronomical. And each time a reporter brings it up, questions how I was involved, if I’ve talked to that piece of shit, or what I think the future holds with the trial I want to flip the fucking table over. I want to go scorched earth, scream at them, and tell them the real version of what happened. Not the seventy-five angles the media is covering or how they illegally violated his wife’s privacy and blasted pictures of her at her most vulnerable all over the Internet.

I still don’t know where Hannah, Shane’s wife, is and no one will tell me. Not even Colleen, my cousin and the general manager of the Packton Pistons, the major league team our family has owned for generations. She might be my best friend in this world, and the person most helping Hannah at this moment, but she’s being awfully tight-lipped for someone who says she cares about me.

When I cornered her again at today’s press junket, just before we had to go on stage, she said, “Walker, I know how much you’re worried about her. But it’s in everyone’s best interest if she got some space, if she has time to settle down with the girls without any more tension or emotions in the way.”

I’m pretty sure she knows now, even if we’re not explicitly saying it, how I feel about my teammate’s wife. How I’ve always felt. Throughout the years, I’ve done a damn good job of hiding it, of being cordial but aloof to her at social gatherings and acting like a fun uncle to her children. But that night, two weeks ago, when I saw her lying on the ground completely broken, nothing was keeping me from her anymore.

All logic went out the window, only instinct and the raw emotions I’ve shoved down for six years took over, as if I was on autopilot. And as I accompanied her to the hospital, sat by her bed as she slipped under from the drugs they gave her to rest, smoothed her hair away from her forehead and touched her hand simply because I could …

I knew I was done playing it safe. I am done waiting in the wings. Of course, I will give her time. All the time she needs. If she can only give me friendship for the next decade, then that is what I’ll take. But I’m not hiding my feelings any longer, I’m not avoiding her or skirting around seeing her simply because I can’t be in her presence without blurting out how I feel. My utmost priority now is making sure that she is safe, protected, and happy. I’ll stop at nothing, pay any price.

Which is why I can’t help but provide monosyllabic, snippy answers in these interviews. Normally, I’m the club’s golden boy, the hometown son who made it big. I carry the legacy of the Callahan name, the only family to ever own a ball club and have one of its members play for the team, on my back. And I’ve done it with pride. I’ve played the charming all-American, toed the party line and completed all that’s been asked of me.

For some reason, though, I just can’t summon the smile today. The expression I have in my back pocket for cringeworthy media encounters, or the perfectly programmed interview responses I have tattooed on my