Chapter 2 Careful What You Find

Joey POV

The light hit his face a half second before my brain caught up to what I was looking at, and my whole body sagged like someone had cut a string holding me up.

"Holt." His name came out shakier than I meant it to. "You scared me half to death."

He blinked against the phone light like it was the sun. "Sorry, sorry power's out on this whole floor, I was coming to check the breaker and I heard someone talking to themselves down here." A pause. "That someone being you."

"I wasn't talking to myself. I was talking to Marnie."

"On the phone that's currently in your other hand, not up to your ear?"

I looked down. He was right. I didn't remember putting it there. "I was thinking out loud. It's allowed."

"Never said it wasn't." He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, easy the way he always was, like nothing in the world had ever actually gone wrong for him. "You want to tell me why the door wouldn't open, or should I guess?"

"It's stuck. This building hates me."

"This building hates everyone equally. I checked." He reached past me, jiggled the handle once, and it gave immediately, swinging open like it had never been stuck at all. He didn't say anything about that. Neither did I.

"Breaker's this way," he said, and I followed him down the hall because staying alone in the dark room with my heart still going too fast felt worse than walking next to him.

The lights came back two minutes later, buzzing on one row at a time like the building was waking up slow and grouchy. Holt shut the breaker box and turned around, and in the new light I could see he looked as tired as I felt tie loosened, sleeves shoved up, the kind of tired that comes from staying somewhere you don't have to be.

"You always work this late?" I asked.

"Only when ownership meetings run four hours over because my grandfather won't stop relitigating a trade from 2009." He rubbed the back of his neck. "You always work this late?"

"Only when the deck eats my tape three times and I refuse to let it win."

"Very healthy relationship with inanimate objects."

"It's the only relationship I have time for."

That got a real laugh out of him, short and surprised, like I'd caught him off guard on purpose. "Fair. So what had you talking to yourself down there? For real."

I hesitated. It would've been easy to say nothing and let it go. But the legal pad was still sitting on the desk back in the video room, four pitches written down in handwriting that got messier every line, and some part of me wanted to say it out loud to a person instead of just Marnie's voice through a phone.

"My dad threw the same exact pitch sequence in two different games," I said. "Three years apart. Same four pitches, same order, against completely different hitters. It shouldn't be there. It doesn't make sense as strategy."

Something moved across Holt's face quick, there and gone, like a light passing behind a curtain. "Huh," he said, and it came out a beat too late to be nothing.

"Huh, like, that's interesting? Or huh, like, you know something?"

"Huh like it's late and I'm bad at reacting to things properly after ten p.m." He smiled, but it didn't reach the same place his laugh had a second ago. "Your dad was good, though. Everyone still talks about him like he invented pitching."

"You'd know. You would've been what, sixteen when he played?"

"Something like that." He said it fast, the way you answer a question you've already decided not to think about. "You should head home. Whatever's on that tape isn't going anywhere before Friday."

"I know. Marnie already gave me this speech."

"Smart woman."

"She usually is." I grabbed my bag from where I'd dropped it against the wall, and when I turned back around he was closer than I expected, close enough that I noticed the exact color of his eyes for the first time in the three years I'd worked here, which was a stupid thing to notice at eleven at night in a basement hallway. My stomach did something I didn't have a name for and didn't want one for either.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I'm glad it was you cutting the reel and not one of the interns. You actually look at the footage instead of just splicing highlights."

"That's the job."

"That's not what I said." He held my eyes for a second longer than easy conversation usually asks for, and I felt the hallway get smaller, the buzzing lights and the dust and the two of us standing in it like we were the only people left in the building, which, at eleven o'clock, we basically were.

"I should go," I said, because it seemed like the safer of the two true things I could say right then.

"Yeah." He didn't move out of the way immediately. "Yeah, you should."

I stepped past him toward the stairwell, and I made it three steps before he spoke again, low enough that I almost missed it under the sound of my own shoes on concrete.

"Joey."

I turned. He was still standing where I'd left him, hands in his pockets now, the easy smile gone somewhere I couldn't follow it.

"Careful what you find in there," he said.

I laughed, half a breath, waiting for the joke to land somewhere. "Find where? In the archive?"

"In the old tapes." He said it plainly, no teasing left in it at all, and that was somehow worse than if he'd shouted it. "Some things get left in the past because somebody wanted them there."

"That's ominous for a guy who spends his days scheduling batting practice."

He didn't laugh. He didn't take it back either. "I'm serious, Joey."

"Serious about what? What is there to find?"

He looked at me for a long moment, like he was deciding something behind his eyes that I had no way of reaching, and whatever he landed on, it made his jaw tighten just slightly before he answered.

"I don't know," he said. "I really don't. I just I've heard my grandfather talk about that season like it's something he'd rather nobody dug up again. I don't know why. I've never asked."

"Why not?"

"Because some questions you don't ask if you like the answers you already have." He gave me a smile that didn't match anything he'd just said, quick and thin, papering over whatever had actually been sitting under his voice a second ago. "Get home safe, okay?"

He turned and walked back down the hall before I could ask him anything else, footsteps fading toward the stairwell on the far side, and I stood there alone under the buzzing lights with my bag on my shoulder and my father's four pitches still written in my own shaky handwriting waiting for me one floor down, and one thought looping over and over where I couldn't shut it off:

He knows something. And he just decided, on purpose, not to tell me what it is.