She smiles. It is the first unguarded expression I've seen from her — brief, asymmetric, pulling the scar on her lip into a thin white line. It transforms her face from beautiful into something more dangerous, which is likeable.
I should not find Tala Sarmiento likeable. Professional investment is appropriate. Strategic interest is useful. Admiration for her physical gifts is objectively defensible.
Liking her is a complication I did not plan for.
"Phoenix is in twelve days," I say, redirecting. "I'll need access to your practice schedule, your current club specifications, and your yardage data from the last six events. I'll have course maps and a preliminary strategy document ready by the following Monday."
"You're assuming I've agreed."
"You agreed when you showed up eleven minutes late wearing clothes that suggest you wanted to make an impressionrather than hit golf balls. If you intended to decline, you'd have arrived in athletic wear and left after the first handshake."
She laughs. Short, involuntary, almost irritated. The sound is warm and rough and entirely different from her speaking voice.
"You think you've got me figured out."
"I think I've read the greens. Whether the putt falls depends on you."
She looks at me for a long moment. The light has shifted as the sun climbs — her eyes have gone from amber to dark gold, and the shadows beneath her cheekbones have sharpened. She's making a decision, and for once, she is making it slowly.
"Thursday at six," she says. "I'll have the yardage data. And I am never eleven minutes late on purpose. Bisi gave me the wrong address."
"Bisi gave you the correct address. I confirmed with her last night."
"Then I have a terrible sense of direction."
"Your course navigation suggests otherwise."
She collects her clubs. Shoulders the bag herself — no cart, no caddie, just a woman carrying her own weight across the practice area. I watch her walk toward the car.
She stops. Turns.
"Nerys."
"Yes."
"You said nobody's watched me the way you have. What exactly did you see?"
The honest answer is:everything.Every competitive round available on film. Every pre-shot routine. Every decision point. The way she breathes before difficult swings. The way her body finds its natural rhythm in the four seconds before a putt and then abandons it the moment she recognizes what she's doing.
The honest answer is also:a woman whose talent makes me furious because she treats it like currency to be spentrather than capital to be invested, and the fury has lived in my chest for four years alongside something warmer that I have been calling professional interest because the alternative is inadmissible.
I give her the useful portion.
"I saw a player who has every tool required to win a major championship except the willingness to trust the shot she doesn't want to play."
She nods. Doesn't argue. Puts the bag in the trunk and gets in the car.
I stand on the range and watch the dust settle behind her tires, and I let myself acknowledge what I already know.
The attraction is not strategic.
It is not professional.
It is not contained by the language I've been using to describe it.
The woman is twenty-seven years old and has the temperament of a lit match, and I have not felt anything this immediate since before the yips, before the collapse, before I taught myself to interpret every physical response as data rather than feeling.
My hands are steady. I hold them up and check. Steady.
