My father is not a man who idles outside buildings for no reason. He drives with intention and parks with purpose, and the only reason he would be here at eight forty-seven on a Tuesday night is either coincidence or the particular instinct he has always had to head off situations he wants to avoid.
I have been inside that instinct my entire life and know exactly how it works.
I keep my eyes on the folder.
Behind me, the studio is quiet. Reece doesn’t make a sound. I don’t look back at him because if my father sees my face, he’ll read it, and my face isn’t doing what I need it to right now.
The truck doesn’t move.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
I turn a page in the folder. Pretend to study it. The design I’m looking at is a Celtic knot I drew six months ago and could reconstruct from memory, but right now it’s the most fascinating piece of artwork I’ve ever seen, and I am a professional studying her work alone in her studio on a Tuesday evening.
My phone is in my back pocket. I consider it. If he comes in, there’s nothing I can do. Reece is shirtless on my tattoo chair with fresh ink on his ribs, and there is no version of that scene I can explain without explaining everything. If he doesn’t come in, we’re fine. If he calls me, I answer, I sound normal, and end the call.
The variables are not in my favor.
Another thirty seconds.
The truck engine drops in pitch.
Pulls forward.
For one terrible second, I think he’s parking, but then the headlights swing out, he turns, moves down the street, and disappears.
I don’t move for a full ten seconds after the sound fades.
“He’s gone,” I say.
I hear Reece exhale.
I close the folder and walk back to my station on legs I’m not entirely confident in. He’s sitting up, one arm resting across his knee, watching my face with the careful attention he usually keeps reserved for batters. His shirt is still off. The tattoo on his ribs is three-quarters finished, the shading half-done, my machine sitting warm and idle on its stand.
“Are you okay?” he says.
“Fine.” I sit down on my stool, pick up a fresh pair of gloves, but set them down again.
“Ava.”
“I’m fine.” The words are steady, but the rest of me is not. I can feel my hands, and I’d rather not right now because the faint tremor in them would be legible to anyone paying attention, and Reece is always paying attention. “He drives by sometimes. It doesn’t mean he knows anything.”
“He parked for two minutes and stared at your studio.”
“He was probably looking for my car.”
“And when he didn’t see it?”
I don’t answer because the answer is that when he didn’t see it, he might have assumed I was with someone, which is why he drove away instead of coming in, which means I was fine, which means tonight was a near miss we survived and nothing more.
Except my hands are still trembling.
Reece reaches over and puts his hand over mine.
No comment on the trembling. No speech. He waits.
“My father…” I say finally, “… has spent thirty years watching players make bad decisions. He has seen careers end because of distractions,real distractions, the kind where someone loses focus and makes choices they can’t come back from. He’s watched contracts fall apart, seasons collapse, and promisingathletes walk away from the game because their personal lives ate them alive.”
