He’s still smiling when he takes the bottle and the corkscrew, and the domesticity of him standing in my kitchen uncorking wine, easy and unhurried, does something complicated and warm to the anxiety currently occupying the center of my chest.
“Reece,” I say.
“Mm…”
“Whatever happens tonight—”
“It’ll be okay.”
“You don’t know…”
“It’ll be okay,” he repeats, and the certainty in it isn’t arrogance. It never is with him. It’s something quieter. Something earned. He sets the open bottle down and turns to face me across the counter. “Whatever he says. Whatever his reaction is in the first five minutes. It’ll be okay.”
I want to argue. I’m very good at arguing. Instead, I nod because the buzzer goes off before I can say anything else. My stomach drops somewhere below the floorboards, and Reece gives me a look that is equal parts steady, warm, and deeply aware of what this moment costs me.
“Go let him in,” he says. “I’ll stay in here.”
“No.” I straighten. “Stay visible. I’m done hiding.”
Something moves across his face. He picks up both wine glasses, passes one to me, and leans against the counter as if he lives here. As if this is exactly where he’s supposed to be.
The buzzer sounds again.
I go.
My father fills a doorway the way very few people do. Not just the physical presence of him, broad-shouldered, silver at the temples, carrying the particular authority of someone who has spent thirty years making twenty-year-olds do what he tells them. It’s the whole effect. The way his eyes move when he enters a space, cataloging and assessing, arriving at conclusions before he’s taken his coat off.
He arrives at this one in approximately four seconds.
He sees Reece standing in my kitchen, wine glass in hand, entirely at ease, and the silence that follows is the specific kind I remember from childhood, the kind that means my father is deciding how to handle something.
“Coach Bishop.” Reece’s voice is level. Respectful. Not a trace of the apology that would ring false, and none of the aggression that would make things worse. “Can I pour you a glass?”
Dad looks at me.
I hold his gaze. “Come in, Dad.”
He does. He sets the bakery box he’s carrying on my table. He looks at Reece, then he looks at me, and I watch him process the evidence in front of him—the three place settings, the two bottles of wine, the easy familiarity in the way Reece moves around my kitchen, the fact I am not flinching, apologizing, or doing any of the things I might have done in the past.
“How long,” Dad says. Not a question, it’s a calculation.
“Long enough,” I tell him.
“Since before or after the game last week?”
“Before.”
“How long before?”
“Dad.”
“Ava.” His voice is not angry. It’s something more complicated than anger, the specific register he uses when he’s confronting something he has suspected but hasn’t been ready to confirm. “How long?”
“Since the beginning of the season.”
The silence returns. Reece stays still, holding the wine glass, not filling the quiet and not shrinking from it either. He told me once that the best thing he learned from years of pitching was how to wait. How to hold the moment without rushing it.
He’s doing it now.
