Page 85 of The Art of Catching Feelings

Turns out, maybe he wasn’t holding it together as well as he thought he was.

He hung a left in the hallway, away from the video room instead of toward it. Looking for Daphne was pointless, its own agonizing form of muscle memory that he would have to work to actively rewrite. Eventually he’d get to where something happened and he wouldn’t immediately want to share it with her. Eventually he wouldn’tmissher with an ache that made him want to forget his anger, forget his hurt, forget anything if it just meant he could have her back.

It would take time, that was all.

FORTY

For weeks, Daphne had checked her Instagram DMs every day, waiting to see if Chris had responded to her message. But not only had he not responded—he apparently hadn’t even checked it, because the little grayed-outSentnever changed toSeen.

There had seemed something fitting about returning back to the original communication method they’d used. More important, she’d thought a DM had less of a chance of waking him up in the middle of the night than a text, gave him the opportunity to consciously check the message instead of being surprised by it at some point when maybe he wouldn’t want to receive it.

The only problem was now she didn’t know what to do. Should she delete the message, hope he never saw it? Should she resend it as a text instead? What if he was ignoring her on purpose, though—what if he’d seen the message come in and had left it to sit in his inbox, unread?

She tried to gauge his attitude toward her in person, but he was impossible to read. Sometimes she thought he’d softened toward her. Once, she tripped a bit on a wire stretched across the field, and he’d reached out to steady her even though she’d been in no danger of falling. Another time, she’d been laughing at something Beau Bummer had said after an interview and she’d lookedup to catch Chris watching her, a momentary bleakness around the eyes until he blinked it away.

But for the most part, he treated her exactly the way he’d said he would that last day in his condo. He answered her baseball questions on camera, and other than that he had no interaction with her at all.

So she stopped checking her messages. And then eventually, she deleted the app from her phone entirely, sick of that twist in her gut every time she saw its icon on her phone screen.

It was mid-September when Layla went into labor. Daphne got the phone call from Donovan two hours before a game was supposed to start, and she’d anxiously filled Greg and the rest of the production team in on what was going on, saying why she wouldn’t be able to do the broadcast that night. She didn’t even know if she’d fully made sense, but they seemed to understand enough to tell her not to worry about it, to go be with her brother, to give their best to Layla. She drove faster than she ever had before to get to the hospital and barely had time to freak out about how stressful it was to have to cross four lanes of traffic to make a last-minute turn.

“You know these things take hours,” Donovan said once she got there. He was watching the game on his phone, casually eating a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and then frowning down at the cheese dust he was getting all over the phone screen.

Even Layla looked calm and unbothered. “Epidural,” she explained. “I can’t feel anything below my waist and I don’t want to. Who’s filling in for you?”

“That guy Preston,” Daphne said.

Layla made a face. “Ugh, I hate him,” she said. “He talks like he has marbles in his mouth. And is it just me, or is his neck weirdly saggy for him being so small?”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever noticed his neck.” Daphne looked at her brother for help, but he was pumping his fist.

“Kepler with a two-RBI double,” he said. “Man, I actually think they could do it. Cleveland is also fighting for a Wild Card spot but their ace pitcher just went out with an oblique strain.”

The energy around the team had been pretty electric in the last few weeks. Against all odds, they’d had anamazingAugust when a couple other teams in their division had started to slide, setting the Battery up with a viable shot at making the playoffs.

“He’s had a great couple months,” Layla said. “I told you it was the right decision not to tell him.”

Daphne cut her gaze over to her brother. She’d never known for sure if Layla had told him everything that went down with Chris Kepler. On the one hand, they were married, which brought with it its own code. She couldn’t blame her sister-in-law if shedidtell Donovan. On the other, the only thing more embarrassing than Donovan finding out she’d been hooking up with a baseball player would be Donovan finding out that she’d been dumped by the same baseball player for catfishing him.

Layla seemed to catch Daphne’s look, and waved her hand. “Of course he knows,” she said. “And he told me I was out of line for my Theranos comment. What you did was not the same as defrauding investors out of millions of dollars and average citizens out of accurate and safely obtained medical data. And you’re not the Yoko Ono of the Battery.”

“You…never called me that,” Daphne said.

“Oh,” Layla said, her tan skin coloring slightly. “Well, good.”

At least not to myface, Daphne should’ve clarified. But whatever. It was over. “Yoko Ono wasn’t even the Yoko Ono of the Beatles,” she said. “If you’re meaning it the way I think you are. We love to say John Lennon is a genius until apparently when it comes time to making his own decisions about—”

“I like that ‘Imagine’ song,” Donovan cut in. “That’s the Beatles, right?”

“I’m just saying,” Layla said, blatantly talking over her husband. “It was obviously the right call not to tell him. Look at how well he’s been doing.”

Daphne should just let that go. She didn’t want to air her dirty laundry now, here in a hospital room with the imminent (or not-so-imminent, apparently) arrival of her nephew. And what did it matter, if Layla was right or wrong or if all of it had spiraled into some gray area where Daphne didn’t even know what was right or wrong anymore.

But.

“He found out, actually,” Daphne said. “It really sucked and everything exploded and I guess you could say we broke up if you could even have said we were together in the first place, and now I get to ask him questions after the game about how awesome it is now that his batting average is up and pretend I don’t want to cry.”

Donovan looked up from his phone, his mouth open in slack-jawed shock. Layla popped a handful of ice chips, crunching them noisily with her teeth until eventually she swallowed.

---