He inhales like the air hurts. “And the fallout?”
“I’ll carry what’s mine,” I say. “You don’t need to carry it for me to love me.”
The smallest sound leaves him, a father’s prayer to a God he once believed could put children back in cradles and keep boys from cracking their skulls on ice. It’s gone in a blink. “This is a professional event,” he says, finding footing where he can.
“It still is,” I say. “If anyone can keep it that way, it’s me.”
A donorwe both tolerate drifts too close, all cologne and expensive teeth. “Coach Wayne!” he booms, pretending he hasn’t been circling like a fly. “Speech soon? My wife’s dying for the cocoa bar.”
Wayne pivots like a soldier. “Ten minutes,” he says, smile back in place.
“Can we get a photo?” the donor adds, eyes slicing toward me and then to Triston, hungry for a souvenir with blood in it.
“No,” Dad says without temperature, and the donor flinches like a man who didn’t expect the door to be a wall.
“Excuse us,” I say to the donor with a sweetness I honed in a thousand rooms where men confuse access with ownership. He scuttles; the air around us earns an inch of privacy.
Dad steps closer by one half-step and keeps his voice low. “There’s a hallway behind the stage,” he says. “I won’t make a scene out here. But we are not done.”
“I know,” I say.
His eyes flick to Triston again. “You come too,” he says, and it’s not a request and not quite an order—more like inviting a storm to the porch because you’re too tired to pretend it isn’t already inside.
“Coach,” Triston says, “before we do that, I need to say one thing to you in this room so there’s no confusion later.”
My stomach yanks up under my ribs, but I don’t take my hand off his chest. His pulse is steady. Mine is not. The circle around us tightens with silent appetite.
Wayne lifts his chin half an inch as if,say it.
I look up at Triston, ready to shoot my palm across his mouth if he decides to hurl his heart like a glass through a window. He glances down at me first—okay?—and waits. The fact that he waits, here, inside this pit, turns my fear into something I can hold without burning.
“Goon,” I whisper. “Say it.”
He nods once. Then he looks my father dead in the eye and says, in a voice that carries to the back table and no further, “I love your daughter, sir. I will not hide it. I will not embarrass her. I will not make you smaller to make us bigger. But I won’t be smaller either. If you need to swing at me for a while to make sense of it, I’ll stand still. I won’t swing back.”
Silence rolls through the ballroom like a tide pulling its breath. The donor wives lean, the rookies go pale, the PR lead somewhere near the step-and-repeat says oh my God under hers. I don’t look at any of them. I watch my father’s face rearrange itself around the sentence. Not the love—that part he recognized weeks ago. The promise. The part where Triston refuses to make a god of him or a child of me.
Dad’s mouth parts. He closes it. He looks at me. “You cosign that?” he asks, harsh because soft will break him in public.
“Yes,” I say. “Every word.”
He nods once—one of those nods you earn after months of drills you hated. Then, to Triston: “Hallway. Five minutes. Then we put the suits back on and run our show.”
“Copy,” Triston says, and I nearly laugh because who usescopyat a gala. Men who speak fluent locker room and bring it to ballrooms like a first language, that’s who.
Dad pivots away. The crowd breaks open to swallow him and close again like the sea behind a ship. I release a breath I didn’t realize I was still strangling.
“You were perfect,” I tell Triston, and I mean terrifying and brave and mine.
“I was honest,”he says, which is the scarier word. He looks like a man who’s about to walk into a room where he’ll let my father hit him in the mouth with a sentence and call it even.
“I’m coming,” I say.
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Don’t you tell me to sit this out,” I snap, heat roaring back, fear and fury braided together. “I’m not a prize handed between men.”
His face softens like I just handed him a sunrise. “I know. I meant no—you’re not coming because I don’t need a witness to prove I can stand up. You’re staying because you run this room. And because if it goes bad in there, I want to come out and see you and know which way is north.”
