He was naming the price.
My father texts twenty minutes after Gil hangs up. He has waited for the day to do its work before arriving to profit from it.
Dad: Plaza Bar. One drink. Before I fly out.
Men like my father always choose rooms with leather chairs, good lighting, and witnesses who know better than to listen openly.
I go alone. Ryan is at the rink, ribs taped, one round deeper, not yet knowing what his city did to me through a pane of owner’s-box glass. I could tell him. He would come. He would sit beside me in that bar, quiet, neither possessive nor heroic, and let my father do his worst to both of us.
That is exactly why I do not call him.
He is already the thing they are using against me. I am not going to hand them a photograph of it.
The Plaza Bar smells like bourbon, money, and conversations built to sound harmless.
My father stands when I approach. Kisses my cheek. Performs warmth for the room.
“Sweetheart.”
“Dad.”
I order sparkling water because I want both hands steady.
He has a folder beside his drink.
He would.
“There is an opening at the LA Times,” he says. “Sports desk. Not glamorous yet, but it gets you home. Pat owes me a favor.”
I almost laugh.
“You saw me on television, so you found me a job?”
“I saw my daughter turning herself into a punchline in a city that will not remember her in six months.”
There he is.
“What do you get?” I ask.
“I get to stop watching you waste your talent.”
“No. What do you get when I leave San Antonio quietly?”
His face stills.
There it is. The small pause before the answer.
“I get to stop watching you make yourself impossible to help.”
“Help for who?”
“For you,” he says.
“And the rooms you still want to enter.”
“Then stop watching.”
His eyes sharpen.
