Chapter 6 What He Already Knew

Joey POV

The dial tone kept ringing in my head long after I'd hung up, three flat notes looping over and over like a song stuck somewhere I couldn't reach to turn it off.

I called Marnie from Walton's driveway, my voice coming out thinner than I wanted it to. "His number's disconnected. Not turned off. Disconnected, like it never existed."

"Come here," she said. "Now. Don't drive past the stadium, don't stop anywhere. Just come here."

I don't remember most of the drive. I remember pulling into her building's lot with my hands still gripping the wheel two seconds after I'd already put the car in park, like my body hadn't caught up to the fact that we'd arrived.

Marnie opened the door before I knocked, laptop already tucked under one arm, and pulled me inside without a single hello.

"I ran the whole season," she said, sitting me down at the table like I was something fragile. "Every game he pitched that last year. I mapped every pitch sequence against every hitter, every count, every situation a pitching coach would actually call for."

"And?"

She turned the laptop toward me. Rows and rows of data, more than I'd sent her, more than I even knew existed , she'd pulled archived box scores, cross-referenced them against the tape timestamps, built something that looked less like a spreadsheet and more like a map of a mind working very hard to hide something in plain sight.

"There's no version of this that's an accident," she said. "I checked for patterns real pitchers actually use , guys who like to open with a fastball, guys who save the curve for two strikes. None of it explains what he's doing. The sequence repeats exactly, letter for letter, only in games where the numbers on that note line up with the game date." She tapped the screen. "It's not baseball, Joey. It's a code. He built a whole language out of four pitches and used it like other people use Morse."

I stared at the screen until the numbers blurred, and somewhere under the blur I felt the ground shift the way it does right before you understand something you can't take back. My father hadn't just thrown strange pitches. He'd built something. On purpose. For someone.

"Who was he sending it to?" I asked, though some small ugly part of me already suspected I knew.

"Walton caught every one of these games." Marnie said it gently, like she knew what it would do to me before she said it. "If there's a person on the receiving end, it's him. Was him."

Was. Past tense, already, for a man who two days ago had a locker with his cap still hanging on the hook.

---

I texted Holt on the way home, because Marnie's voice was still in my ear from the night before , you can't do this completely alone , and because some part of me wanted an excuse to see him that wasn't really about Walton at all.

Can I come by the office? Need help finding old HR records. It's about Walton.

He answered fast. Come now. I'm here till seven.

His office sat one floor above mine, glass walls instead of basement concrete, a view of the field that made the whole space feel like it belonged to someone who'd never once had to worry about a machine eating his tape. He waved me in before I'd even finished knocking.

"Walton," he said, before I could get a word out. "This is about him being out sick?"

"He's not sick." I sat down across from his desk, watching his face for anything, any flicker like the one I'd caught two nights ago in the hallway. "His house is empty. His car's gone. His phone's disconnected. That's not a knee injury, Holt."

Something crossed his face , quick, gone almost before it landed , and I would have missed it if I hadn't spent the last two days learning exactly what that particular kind of quiet looked like on someone hiding something.

"That's strange," he said. Careful. Measured. A beat too smooth.

"Is it?" I kept my voice light, testing. "You don't seem surprised."

"I'm not not surprised." He reached for a folder on his desk, flipping it open like he needed somewhere else to put his hands. "People take leave all the time. HR probably has a form on file."

"Can you pull it?"

He hesitated , half a second, no more , and in that half second his assistant knocked and leaned her head through the door without waiting to be let in.

"Sorry to interrupt," she said, already halfway into the room. "Mr. Prescott, your mother wants an update before the board call. She's asking specifically whether the Meeker situation is handled before Friday's meeting."

The room went very still.

The Meeker situation. Not "Walton's sick leave." Not "the coach who didn't show up." A situation, spoken by a woman who clearly already knew there was one, addressed to a man who two seconds ago had told me he wasn't sure why Walton was missing at all.

Holt's face did something fast and controlled, a door closing so quickly I almost didn't catch it opening in the first place. "Tell her it's being taken care of," he said, voice even, not looking at me. "I'll call her after this."

The assistant nodded and left, and the door clicked shut behind her, and for a second neither of us said anything at all.

He'd known. Not guessed, not assumed , known, specifically enough that his own mother was checking in on it by name, specifically enough that there was already a plan in place for what to tell people who came asking, and I had just watched the exact shape of that lie fall out of someone else's mouth two feet away from him.

I thought about calling it out right then. I opened my mouth, halfway through the shape of the words , you knew, you already knew and you let me sit here and ask you like you didn't , and then I looked at his face, at the way his jaw had gone tight and his eyes had gone somewhere far away from mine, and something in me flinched back from it instead.

If I said it now, out loud, there'd be no pretending afterward. Whatever this was between us , the easy jokes, the hallway that felt smaller with him in it, the text messages I kept re-reading longer than they needed , all of it would have to survive being on opposite sides of whatever his family was hiding. And some small, cowardly part of me wasn't ready to find out if it could.

"I should let you get to your call," I said instead, standing up too fast, my chair scraping loud against the floor.

"Joey,"

"It's fine." It wasn't. "I'll ask HR myself."

He didn't stop me. I made it all the way to the elevator before my hands started shaking, not from fear this time, but from the sick, hollow feeling of having just watched someone I was starting to trust prove, without a single word aimed at me, exactly how mu

ch he'd already been keeping back , and having said nothing at all in return.