Seasons later, when Noah was deep in high school and Cameron's playing days were clearly entering their final chapters, they took a walk around the old stadium on an off day. The place was empty and honest in daylight. Without the night glamour, you could see every scuff and every patched seam of turf. Cameron stopped near home plate.
"This is where I stopped being only a player for a minute," he said. "I became responsible for someone else's first belief. That's a different uniform."
Noah scuffed the dirt with his toe. "You ever wish you'd stayed out of it? Kept it simple?"
"Every hard thing I've ever loved asked me that," Cameron said. "Including baseball. Including you. I keep answering no."
Denise's wedding to Paul was small and held in a community-hall room that smelled of floor wax and carnations. Noah gave a toast that made half the room cry and Frank Callahan, in a rare suit, blow his nose with theatrical denial. Cameron stood as a kind of unofficial family member near the cake table, uncomfortable in dress shoes, deeply at ease in belonging. When the DJ played something slow, Noah danced with his mother and felt, for once, that the apartment years and the stadium years and the missing-father years had braided into a rope strong enough to climb.
College recruiting intensified like weather. Emails. Questionnaires. A coach who talked too much about "upside" and not enough about the person. Another who sat with Denise and Paul and asked Noah what he wanted his name to mean in a locker room. Noah chose the second school even though the scholarship was slightly smaller, because meaning had always been his real currency.
The night before he left for campus, Noah, Denise, Paul, Cameron, and Frank — Frank invited by Denise with a threat of eternal guilt if he declined — ate diner food at a long table. They retold the fan-challenge night until the details shone from handling. Frank insisted he had only been "managing expectations." Cameron insisted Frank had been "auditioning for villain of the week." Noah insisted both could be true and that the only line that mattered was the one where someone handed him a bat and meant it.