Chapter 2

That night, my name shot to the top of every trending list online.

Someone forced Leo's season-long decline and the date I joined the team into a side-by-side graphic.

The headline read: "Jinx Spotted: The Home Run King Falls from Grace."

The image was shared hundreds of thousands of times overnight. The top comment, with thirty thousand likes, read: "Get her out of this city."

My phone buzzed all night. Unknown numbers, anonymous accounts, every vile thing imaginable.

The worst part wasn't being hated. It was knowing the truth and not being able to say a single word.

Two months ago, I thought I'd stumbled into the luckiest break of my life.

On the first day of spring training, I stood outside the rehab room clutching a new ID badge that still smelled of plastic. It read Nora Kelly.

That was also the first time the comments that had followed me all my life, invisible to everyone else, went wild over a single person.

The comments had been there for as long as I could remember.

They were like a crowd of restless spectators camped out in the live stream of my life, watching and commenting on everything I did.

I'd never dared tell anyone. Saying it out loud would only get me labeled as crazy.

They fooled around all they wanted, but once they got serious, they were never wrong.

[He won't get any distance on this one. His right hand is firing too early. It'll be a grounder.]

The comment had barely scrolled past when Leo swung. The lower edge of the bat barely caught the ball, sending it dribbling weakly into the infield.

An ugly infield grounder that looked nothing like a ball he'd hit.

"Too bad. His right hand fired too early."

The moment those words left my mouth, Leo froze like he'd been nailed to the spot.

I had no idea how much weight those words carried.

This morning, two months later, I finally understood.

Head coach Mark Sullivan called me into his office, reluctance heavy in his voice. "Nora, we may have to let you go before your probationary period is over."

He pushed a form across the desk toward me, then pulled it back, saying we'd revisit it after the next two weeks of games.

I stood there, unable to speak.

I wanted to scream that I wasn't some jinx, that I was the only person fighting to save that hand.

But the moment I opened my mouth, his injury would be public knowledge.

One evening, not long after I'd started, he stopped me in the rehab room, rolled up his sleeve, and showed me the bandage he'd never once removed.

That was when I learned there was a fracture underneath, left over from the last game of the previous season.

"Nora, if you report this, I'm on the injured list by tomorrow," he said.

His contract had a clause allowing the team to terminate it unilaterally if an injury kept him out for more than sixty days.

Once a thirty-two-year-old baseball player with a fractured right wrist was cut loose, no other team would ever sign him.

"This team hasn't made the World Series in nineteen years. The roster's full of kids in their early twenties. I want to help them."

Just like that, I agreed to Leo's request and helped him hide his right-wrist injury.

When I stepped out, Chloe Bancroft was standing by the door, a stack of reports in her arms.

She was the team's sports performance analyst, always in a crisp suit, every sentence backed by numbers.

I had to admit, she was good.

She could break down every single swing a player took into a dozen different curves and even calculate the rhythm of their breathing.

But her screens had no room for something like a wrist burning hot in the middle of the night.

The team had just created a head of sports performance position, and Chloe was determined to get it. To her, I was the most inconvenient variable of all: a team doctor who hadn't even finished probation.

She didn't close the door when she went in. Every word carried into the hallway.

She spread her reports across the head coach's desk. The first page was a wall of red curves trending downward.

"The current rehab program is a complete failure.

"I recommend suspending this probationary doctor's access entirely and having my team take over Leo's training."

The first item in her plan was to increase the intensity of the strength training.

I stood outside, reading that line through the crack in the door, and went cold all over.

For a hand that was already fractured, that wasn't training. It was a death sentence.

I almost burst in right then to tell them about Leo's injury, but the words died on my lips before they could leave.

After the meeting ended, I stood in the stairwell for a long time, palms slick with sweat.

A single comment drifted quietly across my vision.

[If you want to save that hand, you need to figure something out first.]

[How did you get recruited to this team?]