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"Omar, you could be reading off bingo numbers right now. That stuff tells me nothing about a guy who can't seem to recall the existence of the two kids he brought into this world because of his insecure attachment pattern. Find me footage of him interacting with his caregivers as a neonate or else I'm not interested."

She'd listened to Dougie for a full eighteen minutes of the episode while he wound his way through a coached, yet weak explanation for why he had avoided real fatherhood up until this point and true commitment to the mother of his children for the last four years.

"The pressure of the game was so heavy, you know? I couldn't, like, be a super pitcher and be a super dad, too." Dougie paused. He glanced back at Bud, whose face was contorting as he silently mouthed the next line of an obviously rehearsed statement. "I chose me, yeah, but it was for them."

Ellie had to squeeze her eyes shut for a moment to prevent them from rolling back so hard she'd end up with a corneal abrasion. Had he chosen to screw the waitress in Milwaukee, the kindergarten teacher in Tampa, and the barista in Chicago for his family, too? Perhaps she should ask him if he was aware that throwing a ball straight did not depend on his own balls. She took a deep breath and looked at Bud, who'd given up and hung his head in his hands. Didn't he realize this was a live shot?

"Responsibility is not a choice, Dougie. Once you have kids, it's a requirement," she said. He stared back at her, nodding. She let a good five seconds of dead air hang before giving up on him activating his frontal lobe long enough to respond and reached her hand out to thank him for sitting with her. This guy needed more work than she could dish up on a show that was so "lite" on therapeutic intervention that the words for entertainment purposes only appeared no less than three times in its description on all platforms. She could be delivering better mental healthcare as a hairdresser at this point. And with more integrity, too.

"I think that went really well!" Omar said through the mic inside the producer's booth once Dougie and Bud exited the fishbowl.

"In what way, exactly?" said Ellie, still sitting in her white leather swivel chair. She suddenly felt so incredibly tired. What was the point of all this? No one was paying attention, really. Even Dougie hadn't missed the opportunity to offer to take Ellie on a private tour of his suite at the Standard Hotel as a thank-you during a commercial break. Had he listened to one word she said? Had he listened to one word he himself said? She almost slapped him in the face, but the truth was that she was more disgusted with herself for continuing the show's charade. What had started out as a too-good-to-be-true offer to be the host of Games Over was now becoming a where-did-my-life-go burden.

The coffee in front of her seemed like a good way to shake the feeling off. Ellie took a sip while bowing over the desk to avoid errant drips. She cocked her elbow out to the side and scooted her butt back away from the cup for good measure.

"Dougie seems to be happy, and I think you were able to get some of the pressure off him. I think we're gonna see good things at the game tonight."

"Hmm..." she muttered, sitting down again.

"What, El? You didn't like the show?"

"Yeah. The show was just fine for what it is. And you're amazing, as always. The guest? Come on, do you really think he believes one quarter of the crap he was slinging in here? Here's a better question: Do you think he would have even been slinging that crap without his career being in jeopardy?" As much as she wanted Omar to answer no to both questions and see her side, she also wanted him to give her the listener perspective since they were often wildly divergent.

"Well, I mean... I can't say. You're the expert."

Ellie risked a seated sip, shook her head. "You give me too much credit. I'm not an expert at this. I understand human interactions, motivations, patterns of behavior. I don't understand these guys. I will never understand how chasing sports balls around makes them into heroes while they consider raising their own damned family to be an optional hobby. Then, when they do finally pull their heads out of their asses, we are supposed to praise them for doing the bare minimum of human duties. It's gross."

"I don't know Ellie. They're under a lot of pressure," he said as he collected his notes, the rustling paper sound crackling in her ears.

"Ugh. Please. They are ungrateful, spoiled, entitled, and a waste of my PhD. The players, the coaches, the agents, all of them. I honestly can't figure out why people tune in every week for the same shit, unless they are as daft as the people that walk in here. This wasn't how I wanted to do this show, you know? And I'm tired now. It feels so fake to me. At the beginning of all of this I had the ambition to help people. Can you believe that?" She looked down at her drink, the scummy foam now listing to one side of the plastic cup.