"Of course." A pause designed to sound thoughtful. "The extension was the right call. Clean. Professional. Thompson's office is satisfied."
"You've talked to Thompson?"
"His people reached out. Standard courtesy. They wanted to make sure the family was aligned."
The family. That would be Dad.
"The Donnelly situation," he continued. "I want to be direct. Whatever dynamic exists between you and Donnelly needs to be managed."
He gave no specifics. He knew his meaning was obvious because a Mathers understood what management meant without being told.
"I signed because they were trading him."
It was a sentence I didn't plan to speak. It was the first unperformed thing I'd said to my father in years.
Nearly sixty seconds of silence followed.
"That's not how professionals operate," he said.
"I don't care."
My words echoed in the car. I swallowed and recalibrated.
"I signed a two-year extension to keep someone I love on the roster. I killed my grad school applications to do it. The plan I've been building since I was nineteen is dead because I chose a person over a spreadsheet, and I did it without telling him, which makes me exactly like you."
I heard him breathe. One measured intake.
"We'll talk when you've had time to—"
I ended the call.
Four minutes to dismantle the bones of a relationship that had taken twenty-three years to build.
I threw the phone at the dashboard. The case cracked from the camera lens to the charging port.
I sat in the garage for another seven minutes. Then I started the engine and drove to the only place in the city where the water was warm and the animals didn't know my last name.
Delia buzzed me through the staff entrance.
"Caribbean Reef's been dosed. Lena left notes on the clipboard."
"Thanks."
"Did you eat today?"
"Yeah."
She studied me the way Pratt studied a shooter through traffic, quickly forming a silent conclusion. Then she went back to her crossword.
Behind the Caribbean Reef glass, a blacktip reef shark passed through my field of vision. Steady, unhurried, following the same circular route it followed every night.
Open-ocean sharks didn't circle. They migrated. Covered thousands of miles following thermal gradients and prey populations. The circling wasn't natural behavior. It was adaptive behavior. The animal adjusted to the enclosure so completely that the change appeared to be contentment.
We kept the atmospheric conditions stable and called it thriving.
I stayed at the window for a long time. Long enough for Delia to pass twice, slowing but never stopping.
As I climbed back into my car, my phone buzzed. The 807 Ontario area code.
