I can’t think of any other reason why she’d be calling this late or even calling at all. She never has before.
“Hello? Mrs Vinch? Is . . . it Stew?”
“What?” she asks, her voice clipped and sharp on the otherend of the line. “Oh, no, Stew is fine, as far as I know. Chomping at the bit to get back to work, but fine. Did I wake you?”
She knows she did.
“No, of course not,” I insist, sliding my feet out from under the covers and turning on the sconce mounted to the wall beside the headboard. “What can I do for you, Mrs Vinch?”
“You can tell me that the information I was given tonight is false.”
“Information?”
“That you didn’t stick to the presentation the ownership group approved for Kai Nakamura and that instead you flew him and his agent to Glendale on the team’s private jet to watch a minor league game?”
“Arizona Fall League,” I correct, without thinking. My brain is still sleep fogged.
“That is beside the point,” she snaps back. “Clearly we were hasty in appointing you interim general manager during Stew’s absence if you can’t even conduct yourself as a professional during a negotiation as important as the one with Kai Nakamura.”
“Did you, by any chance, speak to Daniel Wilson tonight?”
“It doesn’t matter who I spoke to.” That confirms it. “You haven’t denied it and, frankly, Ms. Sullivan, you’re trying my patience every second that ticks by.”
“We did. We . . . I,” I correct, because it was ultimately my decision, “I decided that our best chance to sign Nakamura was to show him exactly what he’d be choosing if he signs with the Eagles, who he’d be playing with, the kind of coaches that would support him, a team that will have his back during his big-league career.”
“And you didn’t think to run any of this by anyone, not me, not Stew, you just went off on your own and made a mockery of our organization.”
“That’s not . . .”
“That’sexactlywhat it was. You took the prize free agent of the off season to a Desert Dogs game to eat bad ballpark food and then to a strip-mall taco place for what, two for one margaritas, blowing any chance we had to sign him out of the water?” When she puts it like that, it doesn’t sound great. “I won’t have it and neither will the rest of the board.”
“But . . .”
“You’re fired, Ms Sullivan. Effective immediately.”
The phone goes dead and, with it, so goes my career.
Chapter 18
CHARLIE
When I’m home, I’m used to near absolutely silence at night. The house is set up high enough that the traffic noise from the Pacific Coast Highway doesn’t reach my bedroom, not even when I have the floor-to-ceiling windows open. It’s so quiet that it took a few Brooklyn nights to get used to the near constant noise that would echo into the dawn when I was staying with Javy.
Here, though, the reverberation of the diving board followed by the splash of someone slicing into the pool, just steps from my bed, is enough to wake me from a dead sleep.
There’s a glow emanating up out of the water, blue tinted as it reflects off the pool’s liner and, as I slip out of bed and pad across the room, a blurry shape is still under the water, swimming a strong breaststroke toward the far wall.
Frankie.
Quietly, so I don’t wake Gregory or Javy, who are camped out in the living room just beyond my door, I ease open the sliding door and stand at the edge of the pool, breathing in the cool night air that’s coming in off the ocean in the distance.
It’s a clear night, barely a cloud in the sky, a nearly full moon and stars twinkling down at me, way more so than in New York. The city lights up the night there, instead of the stars. Though, truly, it doesn’t matter to me either way.
Frankie surfaces at the edge of the pool, gasping for breathwhile she holds on to the stone-edged coping, her chest heaving up out of the water.
“Night swimming?” I ask, keeping my voice down. I don’t want to startle her.
Her shoulders tense and she doesn’t turn to face me, not right away.
