Ava opens the door before I knock, which means she heard me coming, which means she was listening for me, which means I’m smiling before I even cross the threshold.
“The food better be hot,” she says.
“The food is perfect.” I step inside, and she closes the door behind me, and the weight of the day, the blogs, the call, the office, the forty-five seconds of corridor, and everything decided in it, settles into something manageable.
“Tell me everything,” she says.
So I do.
Chapter Fourteen
Ava
He comes through my door smelling like fresh air and Thai food, and I hate how immediately my whole body relaxes.
This is the problem with Reece Steele. Not the media. Not my father. Not Lena Hart, her burner numbers, and her loadedInstagramcomments. The problem is the specific way I stop bracing for something the second he walks into a room I’m already in. I’ve spent twenty-six years keeping myself tightly wound and functional, and he unspools me in under ten seconds without appearing to try.
He sets the bag on my kitchen counter, then starts pulling out the containers, navigating my kitchen with the ease of someone who has been here enough times to know which drawer holds the forks and which cabinet holds the plates I actually use rather than the ones I bought at a market three years ago and display as art.
“Sit,” he says.
“It’s my kitchen.”
“And you’ve been standing since I walked in.” He doesn’t look up from the containers. “Sit down, Ava.”
I sit at the kitchen counter because I’m choosing to, not because he told me to. There’s a distinction, and I maintain it privately.
He sets a container in front of me. Pad see ew from the place two blocks over that gets the noodles right. Then a second container, something for himself, something with enough protein to fuel whatever his training schedule demands tomorrow. Then, the chopsticks are lined up parallel, and anapkin is folded once, because Reece has this contradictory quality of doing small things neatly.
“You remembered the no-garlic rule,” I say.
“Seven a.m. client.” He settles onto the stool across from me. “I pay attention.”
He does. This is the part I’m still adjusting to, the fact that he listens the first time, files the information, and produces it later without fanfare, as though keeping track of me is not an effort but an instinct. The oat milk latte with one sugar. The Pad See Ew. The way he texts me after late games, before he texts anyone else, not because I asked him to, but because it occurred to him that I might want to know.
It’s terrifying, but it is what it is.
I pick up the chopsticks and eat, and for a few minutes we don’t say anything. Outside, the city hums its usual nighttime frequency. The string lights above my bookshelf cast the apartment in warm amber. Reece eats with the focused efficiency of an athlete whose body requires consistent fuel, but his eyes keep coming back to me across the counter the way they do when he’s thinking about something he hasn’t said yet.
“Tell me what he said,” I say. “All of it.”
He tells me.
Not in a rush, not softening anything, not editing for my comfort. He walks me through the office, the framing, the career speech, and the clean-headlines request. He tells me my father used the phrase ‘the owner’when he meant me, which lands somewhere tender in my chest because I know exactly why Dad would do that. He would keep the professional distance of it, his attempt to separate his concern for his pitcher from his concern for his daughter, the two things pulling in opposite directions.
He tells me he said nothing useful and left.
I put my chopsticks down. “He’s going to come back harder when nothing changes.”
“Probably.”
“And you’re not going to change anything.”
“No,” he says it simply, without bravado. Not a performance. “But I need you to tell me something honest.”
“I’m always honest.”
“You’re honest about the risks. You’re excellent at cataloging every possible disaster in advance.” He rests his forearms on the counter. “Tell me what you actually want. Not the responsible version. The real one.”
