The draft itself unfolded in Newark, in an arena packed with prospects and their families, television cameras trained on every reaction, the specific controlled chaos of an event that had, for Beckett, represented the culmination of literally his entire life's trajectory up to this exact point.
Rae flew out for the occasion despite her own increasingly demanding pre-camp training schedule, sitting beside Marcus Vance in the family section with a nervous energy that mirrored, she suspected, everyone else's in the packed arena.
"How are you holding up?" she asked Marcus, watching him check his watch for what had to be the fifteenth time in the last twenty minutes.
"Terribly," he admitted, with a wry, self-deprecating honesty that would have been unthinkable from him a year earlier. "I spe
