“I know.”
“No,” I say. “You hear me. That is not the same thing.”
He takes that.
Good.
“I’m not walking away from you,” I say. “But I’m not walking away from the story either.”
His eyes hold mine.
“I’m not asking you to.”
“You did without saying it.”
That gets through, too.
I can see it.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I want to do something with that. Accept it. Reject it. Put it somewhere clean.
There is nowhere clean tonight.
“Call me tomorrow,” I say.
“Okay.”
I leave.
In my car, I sit for a minute with my hands on the wheel.
I am going to follow up on the equipment manager’s email tomorrow. I am going to report the pattern without Finn’s name. I am going to do the work I came to Texas to do.
By tomorrow night, the source either goes on the record or he does not. Either way, I stop waiting for Ryan to make the story safe for me.
I start the car.
My phone is at nine percent because I left the charger at his apartment again.
I drive home on nine percent and almost make it.
Peyton
Round One takes over the city and most of my central nervous system.
The Stampede survive the first four games ugly: two wins, two losses, louder questions, one overtime goal from Evan that makes every analyst suddenly discover the word dynamic, and three nights of Ryan looking bruised in a way that has nothing to do with the game.
By the time Game Five arrives, nobody in San Antonio seems interested in breathing normally.
A win tonight does not end the series.
It puts the Stampede one game away from doing something the franchise has never done.
That is enough to make the whole city behave like history has already started and might punish anyone who looks away first.
I leave the farm Sunday afternoon with a container of leftover pie, two drawings from the twins, and the dangerous sense thatI have been allowed to belong somewhere without earning it through usefulness.
