Page 17 of The Fall Classic

I look at her through my lashes. “You don’t actually believe that after meeting him last night.”

“I met him last year. He comes to the window all of the time.”

“What? You never told me?”

“Why would I tell you?”

“Because I’ve had a huge crush on him since the first time he got caught reading a book in the bullpen during a game!”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Alma! Why couldn’t you have had me work the window?”

“Because the people are rude, and rude people hurt your feelings.”

“They hurt everyone’s feelings.”

“Not me. Their rudeness feeds me. Besides, that was last year, and this year, you’ve worked the truck.”

I give a pained laugh into my hands. “He’s really been coming here for a year?”

“A year and a half. He’s good. Cares about people. Sticks up for people.”

“And he ghosts them, too,” I say, frowning.

She rolls her eyes. “He’s been here since eight thirty. He was in the restroom.” She looks over my right shoulder. “And he’s back.”

I stand straight and see her eyes crinkle with a smile that won’t show anywhere else. She picks up her cloth and wipes the counter where my arms left an impression and where my braid hit.

“Go sit down, mija,” Alma says behind me.

I walk over to the table, where Logan is already sitting, his eyes burrowing into me. I can’t see what he’s wearing apart from one of those sweat-wicking tees athletes always wear and a powder blue Mudflaps baseball cap. And in his hands is⁠—

Oh my gosh, it’s his copy of Robert Frost’s poems.

I’m swooning so hard, I need a fainting couch.

“You came,” he says, and I think from the twitching in his lips, he’s trying not to smile.

I hold mine back, too. I’m already pushing it by letting myself be excited at all. If I start throwing out smiles, I’m going to start hoping.

I can’t start hoping.

Crushing, on the other hand …

“So did you,” I say. “I thought you might forget.”

His light blue eyes turn steely for a second. “That’s not my style. My dad was big on ‘Be where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there.’”

Of all the things my dad has never said⁠—

“That must have been nice. Growing up with a dad who felt that way.”

He nods. “Yeah, it was. My dad’s an umpire in the Majors, so he was gone a lot. And, I don’t know, there’s a lot of … cheating that happens in professional sports. Umps aren’t immune to that. He saw his buddies lose their families because they would go out, be places they shouldn’t be. He always said he loved our family too much to do that. So after a game, he’d send us a picture from dinner, a picture from the gym, and then he’d go straight to his hotel room to FaceTime us, and that’s how he’d spend the rest of the night.”

“Wow,” I say. “What devotion.”

“Yeah, my dad’s my hero for a lot of reasons. That’s one of them.”