Somewhere behind me, a woman with a Halden lanyard is talking fast into her phone. Every face in the room is turned our way now, and Patrick Cross is standing in the middle of it withnowhere to put his hands, learning what I already know about rooms like this.
They remember.
thirty-two
ROWAN
The room turnsbefore I understand why.
I’m stuck along the back wall with my father, half-listening to one of his stories and another of his plans that I stopped caring about somewhere around the third name — which scouts called, which didn’t, and which phone call fixes it.
He’s standing close, shoulder turned out to the room so it reads as a private father-son moment. My mother sent her apologies again — a headache, the kind I stopped believing years ago, the kind that arrives precisely when a room like this one beckons.
I’ve been nodding for forty minutes. That part isn’t new. What’s new is that I’m not selling him the certainty he wants, not running the calculations a half-step ahead of him to anticipate what he wants, the way I’ve done since I was twelve.
But then the noise changes, and I look up over my father’s shoulder.
Sloane is near the end of the bar with Ivy beside her and Patrick Cross planted directly in front of her. She’s holding herself proud, chin up and shoulders set, and beneath all that tension is something I’ve never once seen her let a room see.
Fury.
Everything in me goes still.
I don’t excuse myself or finish the conversation. My father is mid-sentence, something about how a man who lets a window close spends the rest of his life looking through someone else’s glass, and I walk away from him.
Because I don’t care how that sentence ends.
My legs eat the distance, and the whole way over there, a pressure under my sternum tightens, because I know exactly what my body wants to do. Get between them. Take her by the elbow and move her behind me. Stand in front of her and take the storm head-on.
But I don’t do that.
I get to her side just as Patrick says something low and furious — the tail of whatever he’s hissing now that she’s turned the whole room on him — and I stop, put my hand on the small of her back, and wait. That’s it. That’s all I do.
Her spine straightens under my palm, and the shaking — the furious kind, not the scared kind — steadies by a degree. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t have to. She knows it’s me, and she knows the hand is going to stay exactly where it is.
Patrick’s eyes cut to me. “Hale, good. Maybe you can talk some sense into your girl?—”
“No,” I say. “I’m not going to do that.”
He scoffs. “Then you should think about your future. People are watching.”
“I know they are.”
“The calls have already been made, Rowan. Your stock is not what it was in October, and the reason is not your play — it’s the company you keep and the noise that comes with it.”
“I know,” I say. “But I’m not chasing it.”
He stops.
“The league.” I keep my voice even, but I let it carry the way hers did, because I want it heard thirty feet back, where my father is standing. “Not on your timeline.”
“That’s preposterous,” Patrick spits. “Nobody has?—”
“I don’t care what others do. I’m staying at Halden, with Sloane, and I’m finishing my degree and captaining this team. After that, it’ll be my call, on my timeline, and it might be the league or it might not. But it will be my decision, and nothing I decide will be because of you or anyone else.”
“You’re making a mess, Rowan,” Patrick says, low and ugly now, the polish gone. “You’re throwing it all away over a girl.”
“Sometimes a little mess is good,” I say. “The leverage you’re trying to use only works if I want the thing more than I want anything else, and I’ve decided I don’t.”
