Big Love "cc!"

"Nah," CC said. "It's cool."

A week later, after midnight on May 17, the phone woke Margie out of a dead sleep. She picked it up, and there was CC's voice, all the cool gone, trembling like a scared little boy's. "Mom, there was a gun," he said over and over. "They put a gun to my head."

Earlier that night Sabathia and his cousin Jomar Connors had gone to WISH, a nightclub in Cleveland's Warehouse District, for the birthday party of a local model. There was an after party for a group of VIPs in a suite at a nearby Marriott. When Sabathia and Connors arrived, a small group of women and two men—former Cleveland State basketball stars Damon Stringer and Jamaal Harris—were waiting. Sabathia was wearing $15,000 diamond earrings, a $26,000 necklace with a platinum cross and a $60,000 Rolex watch, and he was carrying $3,200 in cash. Stringer left with Harris, went to Stringer's home and retrieved a 9-mm pistol from the safe, which also held $16,000 in cash.

Sabathia and Connors left the party too, but in the hotel lobby CC realized his Rolex was missing. Connors went back up to the room to search for it, and when Stringer and Harris returned, they showed Sabathia the gun and forced him into the elevator and back up to the suite, where they forced Sabathia and Connors to lie on the floor and picked them clean. Hotel security cameras captured Stringer and Harris leaving the building at 4:03 a.m. Both were arrested within days and pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery. Stringer would serve 25 months. Harris, who had CC's diamond in his ear when he was arrested, did 19 months.

The day after the robbery Sabathia publicly berated himself for having been in that situation, but by then he had already taken corrective measures. Just minutes after the incident, before he called his mother, he had dialed Amber and proposed. "If you were here, none of this would've happened," he said. "Let's just get married."

"CC, you're drunk," Amber said. "It's four in the morning."

"I was going to propose in the next couple of months. Call my mom, because I already told her."

A WEEK LATER Amber packed up her apartment and left for Cleveland. CC's mother and father had come in the day after the robbery, and CC hadn't let them out of his sight. Margie left after a week. Corky moved in and stayed for good. "That was it," Sabathia says. "He lived with me until the day he passed away."

The robbery, CC believes, "was really a blessing in disguise. To have a gun to your head is scary, but it put everything in order. I had gotten the [baseball] contract and I was young, 21, and I felt like I was on top of the world. I had all this, and then I saw how quickly it could be taken away from me."

Amber moved in with him. Corky, free of drugs but hyperwary of spreading HIV, took control of the kitchen, making sure never to share his utensils. He tried to pick up where he'd left off with CC, treating him and Amber as if they were both 15. He'd come down to the pool room in the basement at 10 p.m., announce to the millionaire and his fiancée, "O.K.! Time for bed!" and turn off the lights. Amber wondered when Dad would be leaving, but CC made it clear: not anytime soon.