Page 52 of Nikolay

I served her French toast before she could object, then served myself. Coffee followed. The whole scene should have felt absurdly formal: candlelight, polished silver, old wood, and us seated across from one another like diplomatic rivals being coaxed into civility by cream, strawberries, and pastry.

For a few minutes we ate in a quiet not yet comfortable, but no longer armed silence.

Maddie broke it first.

“I miss baseball,” she said, almost idly, though the note beneath it was not idle at all. “Not even just going. I miss knowing it’s happening. I miss checking scores. Miss the rhythm of a season. Summer has passed and I’ve missed game upon game.”

I looked up.

The subject was unexpected enough to undo me a little. Of all the pathways our longest unguarded conversation might have taken, I had not anticipated Major League Baseball. Yet the instant she said it, some old part of me lit up.

“Yes,” I said before caution could intervene. “It does.”

Her brows lifted. “You know baseball?”

“I know history,” I said. “Baseball merely insists on being treated as one of its more peculiar branches.”

That brought the ghost of another smile.

“Oh, Lord,” she said. “You’re one of those.”

“One of what, exactly?”

“The kind of man who can turn a ballgame into a lecture on civilization.”

I leaned back slightly. “That depends. Are we speaking of baseball as sport, as statistical obsession, as ritualized nostalgia, or as one of America’s more successful efforts at myth-making?”

The delight that moved across her face then was immediate and wholly genuine. “You really do know baseball.”

“I know its origins were less tidy than its legends. I know it spent years pretending to be simpler than it was. I know no nation sentimentalizes itself through a summer game with quite such efficiency.”

She laughed softly. “Okay, professor. Who’s your team?”

“The Phillies,” I said.

“Of course they are.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What precisely does that mean?”

“It means you live in Philadelphia and dress like a European prince even at breakfast. There was never any chance you were going to say the Mets just to keep things interesting.”

“God forbid.”

She took another bite of pastry, then pointed at me with it. “Well, for your information, I am a Texas Rangers girl till I die.”

“A noble declaration,” I said. “Historically inconvenient, but noble.”

Her mouth fell open a fraction. “Did you just insult my team over French toast?”

“I merely acknowledged the record.”

“Excuse you. We have a record.”

“Yes,” I said. “That is the difficulty.”

She laughed again, and this time the sound moved through the room like heat.

I found myself leaning forward without realizing it, forearms settling lightly near my plate. “If we are discussing Texas, I will grant you this much: there is something deeply American in the Rangers as an institution. Expansion, reinvention, sun-baked endurance, periodic heartbreak.”