He turned his attention back at my jacket.
"Anyway," he said pleasantly. "Doesn't matter."
He didn't say anything else about it.
Neither did I.
Across the ballroom Nathan Cross was staring at his tablet. The man who had driven to my apartment last night and saidfuck itand was now standing twenty feet away being a complete stranger about it.
I was a professional.
I had a photo shoot to do.
The interview wasin a side room off the ballroom: two chairs, a camera, and a woman named Bianca who had a warm-but-focused energy.
I knew the format. I'd done versions of this interview before. You sat in the chair and you were relaxed and you were honest in a way that felt like honesty without actually requiring any.
Bianca smiled at me. I smiled back.
"Let's start with something fun," she said. "The incident in Philadelphia."
I kept my smile. "Which one?"
"The one involving the visiting team's mascot."
"Okay so," I said, "in my defense, I did not know the eagle was real."
"It was listed as a live mascot in the game program."
"I don't read the game program, Bianca. I'm focused on the game."
"You chased it."
"I didn’t—Well. Okay. There was a misunderstanding about personal space, and we both moved in the same direction at the same time."
"For about forty feet."
"The eagle startled me."
"You're almost six feet tall."
"Eagles are unpredictable," I said. "That's a fact about eagles. Ask anyone."
Bianca was definitely smiling now, the professional composure doing its best and losing. "The league fined you four thousand dollars for"—she checked her notes—"conduct detrimental to the in-game experience."
"The eagle was fine," I said. "The eagle and I are fine. We've moved past it."
"Have you?"
"Professionally, yes." I paused. "I still don't trust birds."
Bianca made a note that I was fairly certain said something other than what her notes usually said. Then she smiled, shifted, and the warmth stayed but the angle changed, the way angles changed when an interview moved from the fun part to the real part.
“Let’s talk about last season.”
There it was.
It always came back to this.
