The grocery store. The basket. The can.
Oh my God.
I made Jax Mercer play rock-paper-scissors for cat food.
I close the laptop.
Open it.
Close it again.
And there it is.
The full collision.
Grocery store guy has a name.
Jax Mercer.
And my name on that hit piece that smeared him.
“Good one, Nova.”
Out loud. To nobody.
I sit in my car in the arena parking lot with the engine off and the Florida heat pressing against the windshield and my credential still hanging around my neck like evidence.
I knew I was coming here. I knew I’d be around the team. I knew I’d have to live with the old piece sitting in the background like a stain.
What I did not know was that grocery store guy was Jax Mercer.
That part feels like karma coming for me.
I changed my name to get out from under one version of myself. Put V. North to bed. Start over clean.
And now here I am, sitting in a parking lot with my recorder and my notebook and my full embedded access and absolutely no way to un-steal a man’s cat food or unpublish my own terrible decisions.
I drive home with my brain chewing on the same five humiliating details.
She’s on the steps when I pull up.
Small. Gray. Scruffy in the way that suggests life has been both rude and consistent about it. One ear nicked. Ribby under the fur. Sitting there like she owns exactly nothing and answers to even less.
She’s been showing up around dinnertime for a week and a half now, which does not make us bonded, attached, or in any way a heartwarming story. It makes me a woman who puts food out for a feral alley cat and gets tolerated in return.
I named her Dina three days ago, which she has done absolutely nothing to earn except continue existing with the kind of grim little refusal I recognize on sight. I put the bowl down three feet away and sit on the step above it. She waits until I stop moving.
That part feels personal every time.
Then she comes forward and eats without looking at me once, like eye contact would be an unnecessary intimacy and we are nowhere near that kind of relationship.
Fair enough.
I blurt out everything anyway.
Griffin. The piece. The roster photo. The exact moment my stomach dropped out in the parking lot.
She keeps eating like none of this is her problem, which, to be fair, it isn’t.
