Eric stopped the treadmill and joined me at the edge of the room. I stopped Cody again long enough to catch Eric up on what was happening. I could have dropped to my knees and kissed his feet when he took the phone away from me.

“Hey Cody, it’s Eric,” he said so Cody would know he was no longer talking to me. “Before you freak out, I’m going to call and talk to Bryce. He’ll know if the phone call was legit or if someone’s trying to fuck with you.”

Eric handed me his phone so I could try Bryce while he tried to calm Cody. The call went directly to voicemail, so I left him a message to call me as soon as his meeting was over.

“Yeah, we can come and get you if that’s what you want but didn’t you have some big exam this afternoon?” I grew impatient as Eric waited for Cody to finish rambling. “Okay, well no matter what’s going on, it’s not going to do you any good to miss that. Do your best to make it through and if you really can’t focus, talk to your counselor and teachers and have them call me… Don’t mention it… Okay, good luck on your test. If we don’t hear from you before the end of the day, why don’t you plan on us picking you up after school?”

Eric ended the call, and we swapped phones. He stormed into the locker room, punching one of the metal locker doors on his way through the room. I considered reminding him that he didn’t want to fuck up his hand, but stopped myself. Right now, that’d be pouring salt in the wound since I knew he still wasn’t as fine with quitting baseball as he tried to make it seem.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but I’m going to find out,” Eric seethed as he snatched his shower kit out of his bag. “I had a bad fucking feeling when Bryce got that phone call. And so help me, if I find out he knew about this and didn’t tell us, I’ll jump on a plane and fly out there to personally kick his ass.”

I grabbed Eric before he could step under the spray of water and turned him to face me. “Do you honestly believe he’d have kept something like this from us?”

“No,” Eric conceded. “But he’s not even out of that meeting and we’re hearing shit from Cody. That’s fucked up.”

“Yeah, it is.” Somehow, I’d become the voice of reason. That was something I was fairly certain no one who’d met me would believe. “But we don’t even know if it’s true or not. For all we know, someone could be trying to mess with Cody’s mind. It’s not exactly a huge secret that he’s been living there, and we all know that kids can be assholes.”

Eric shook his head. “The timing is too perfect. As much as I’d love to believe your little Miss Sunshine logic, I can’t. There’s no way anyone else knows there’s some huge meeting happening right now that had Bryce worried before he left yesterday.”

Shit. He had a valid point. Now I was worried about what we’d find out when Bryce called us back. Eric stepped into the shower and I leaned against the wall, openly watching him as he cleaned up. If we were at home, I’d have offered to help him but we couldn’t be that reckless in a public locker room. It’d already draw attention that I was standing there talking to him while he showered, but that could be played off easily enough. Athletes learned early on that modesty would get you nowhere good in a hurry.

“So what are we going to do?” I asked. If it was my house, there would be no question that we’d go to the center and get Cody’s shit to move him out of there. But it wasn’t, no matter how much Eric claimed otherwise. It was his name on the deed and I still remembered how unenthused he’d been when I’d invited Cam to move in while he’d been out in Seattle.

“First, we’ll get something to eat. Then, we’ll wait for Bryce to call us back. Once we know what’s going on, we’ll all sit down and decide what happens next,” he told me. He smirked as he turned off the water and I knew I’d been busted ogling him. “And just so you have a heads up, I’m going to have a meeting this afternoon, so you’ll probably have to go pick up Cody at the school. Find out if there’s anything you can do so you’re his official contact. It may not be an issue since he’s eighteen, but double check. But make sure you ask him before you do anything. I don’t want him thinking we’re trying to step in and take charge of his life.”

I flashed him a broad grin. Eric loved to give me shit for letting Cody worm his way under my skin, but it seemed I wasn’t the only one who gave a shit what happened to the kid.

I took the keys from Eric and headed out to warm up the car while he got dressed. No matter how much I stared at my phone or flipped it over in my hands, it still didn’t ring. The time on the display showed just before eleven in the morning, meaning it was almost nine in Portland. I felt helpless waiting for Bryce to call me, so I decided to try him one more time.

“Hey, I was just thinking about you,” Bryce answered on the third ring. That was great, but I’d rather he called than tried to somehow communicate telepathically. My skills in that department were seriously lacking.

“You know, it’s the damndest thing. When you’re thinking about someone, you could check your voicemail and know they’re waiting for you to call them,” I chided.

The noise in the background grew louder as Bryce sarcastically tried to apologize for not calling the moment he got out of his meeting.

“It’s fine,” I told him. I debated telling him about our morning, but decided I wanted to give him a chance to explain what he knew first. If it turned out that this was a hoax, there was no sense in upsetting him when he couldn’t do anything about it. Apparently, Eric’s levelheadedness was rubbing off on me. Either that or I was losing my mind. Either were real possibilities. “So, how was the meeting?”

“It sucked,” he responded bluntly. The background noise faded before being replaced by music blasting through the speakers. That seemed out of character for Bryce since he was always bitching at me to turn down the music in my own car. “Is Eric there? I’d really rather only have to talk about this once.”

“That good, huh?” I asked. When Eric stepped outside the building, I leaned over and honked the horn so he’d hurry the hell up.

“Worse, if you can believe it,” he admitted. A pit formed in my stomach because I had a bad feeling the call to Cody’s school this morning was no hoax. Like Eric had said, the timing was too coincidental now that I knew Bryce wasn’t happy about the outcome of his meeting.

I hit the button to connect the Bluetooth. “Okay, we’re both here now.”

“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to do it,” Bryce started. I reached over for Eric’s hand, needing to feel a physical connection to at least one of my guys. “The center’s closing at the end of the month. The founder is unwilling to keep solely funding the daily operations and he sees this as his only option.”

“They can’t fucking do that!” I yelled. “Doesn’t he give a damn that he’s kicking those kids right back out on the streets? He’s the one who gave them a place to go. He’s the one who gave them a sense of security. And it’s all bullshit! Now, they’re going to be thrown out with nothing. Did you fucking explain that shit to him?”

“Drew, you need to calm down,” Eric warned me. I glared at him because there was no fucking way I was going to sit back and let this happen. Someone had to fight for those kids. I’d have thought that someone would’ve been Bryce, but he’d just taken the bad news and walked out. “Bryce, did you ask him if he could give you some more time to either get the funding necessary to keep the doors open or find Cody and the rest of the guys another solution?”

“He wasn’t exactly receptive to anything I had to say,” Bryce admitted.

“So make him listen to you,” I demanded. “You can’t just give up without a fight.”

Eric slid his hand down to my knee and squeezed hard. When I looked over at him, he shook his head as if silently scolding me for my outburst. Well, that was too fucking bad because if Bryce wanted to get pissed at me for calling him out, it’d be because I wasn’t saying anything that didn’t need to be said.