Frank grunted. "Don't thank me. Thank the guy who handed you the bat. And keep your back foot planted. You're still drifting."
It was the closest thing to mentorship Frank knew how to give: criticism delivered like weather, useful if you were willing to stand in it.
Noah's backstory did not begin with baseball. It began with absence shaped like a man.
His father, Ray Bennett, had left when Noah was six — not in a slammed-door rage but in a quiet accumulation of later-and-soon that eventually became never. Denise had worked. Noah had learned to heat leftovers and do homework at the diner counter during closing and fall asleep in booths when the night got long. Teachers called him quiet. Classmates called him small. He collected baseball cards from dollar-store packs and taped them to his bedroom wall in careful rows, creating a team of men who could not leave because they were already paper.
The first time he swung a real bat was at a school field day when he was eight. He missed twice and connected once, a soft grounder that died in the infield grass. A bigger kid laughed. Noah did not. He walked home and practiced until the streetlights came on and Denise called him in with a voice that meant she had counted the hours of daylight left in her body and found them insufficient for worry.
Wanting was Noah's first coach. Wanting taught him to watch games through chain link, to memorize the way professionals loaded their hips, to understand that courage was not the absence of the umpire's voice in your head but the decision to swing anyway.
Over the remainder of that summer, Cameron Blake became a fixed point in Noah's week. Not a father — Noah was too careful with that word — but a presence that showed up when it said it would. They worked on footwork. On timing. On the moral difference between swinging hard and swinging smart. Cameron told stories from the bus rides between small cities, from the nights when the minor-league lights felt like the only honest thing left in a life of almosts.