I wish they'd tremble. Trembling, at least, would be an honest response to what just happened.
I open my notebook. Write the date. Write her name.
Beneath it, in the precise left-slanting script that no one but Phaedra ever reads:
Tempo dishonest. Grip pressure elevated under observation. Takeaway rhythm disrupted by awareness of self. Extraordinary swing. Extraordinary problem.
I close the notebook.
I don't write the last part — the part about her smile, the scar, the way she held my hand one beat past professional and didn't flinch.
I don't need to write it.
I am not going to forget.
CHAPTER THREE
Tala
Day two begins with a quiz.
Not a written quiz — Nerys Quillan does not seem like the type to hand out worksheets, and if she ever tried, I would assume the world was ending. But it's a quiz nonetheless. She walks me through eighteen hypothetical scenarios on the practice green, each one a decision point: wind from the left, pin tucked behind a bunker, fifteen feet of break, hard green, soft green, uphill, downhill, side-hill, rain, heat, cold, firm conditions, receptive conditions.
For each one, she asks the same question.
"What do you see?"
And for each one, I give her the right answer.
I know the right answer. That's the part nobody understands about me. The commentators, the sponsors, the three caddies I've dismissed — they all think I'm ignorant. That I attack blindly. That I'm some kind of golfing berserker who walks onto the course and starts clubbing the ball in whatever direction feels exciting.
I know the correct shot. I always know the correct shot. The problem has never been identification.
The problem is that knowing the correct shot and choosing to hit it are two entirely different psychological events, and the gap between them is where I've built my entire career.
Nerys does not appear surprised by my answers. She does not appear impressed, disappointed, or emotionally responsive in any visible way. She writes something in her notebook after each scenario, nods, and moves to the next.
This is maddening.
I'm accustomed to people reacting to me. Coaches who praise my intelligence. Caddies who look relieved when I demonstrate competence. Commentators who call me "savvy" with the faintly shocked tone of people who expected a beautiful woman to be stupid. I generate reactions. It's part of my operating system. When I walk into a room, I can feel the atmosphere adjust around me, and I calibrate my behavior to keep that adjustment happening.
Nerys Quillan's atmosphere does not adjust.
She stands beside the practice green in the same uniform as yesterday — black trousers, white polo, sleeves rolled to the elbow, plain steel watch, no logos except the swoosh on her shoes that is probably contractual. Her hair is pushed behind her ears. The silver streak catches the Arizona light every time she turns her head, and I've been tracking it the way I track wind flags on the course — involuntarily, constantly, with a precision that is starting to embarrass me.
She is also, in the oblique morning sun, unreasonably tall.
I am five-six. I have been five-six since I was sixteen. I have never felt short. I grew up around my father's mechanics, who were mostly compact men from the same part of Mexico as my grandparents, and my mother, who is five-three and generates more authority per square inch than anyone else I've ever met. My height has never been a variable I notice.
I notice it now.
Nerys is at least six feet, possibly six-one, and she doesn't diminish herself. No rounded shoulders, no concessive lean, no tilting her head down to meet shorter people on their level.She stands at full extension with the posture of a woman who learned early that she would always be seen and decided to be seen on her own terms.
When she looks at me, she looks down. Not condescendingly. Geometrically. There are six inches between us, and those six inches contain a quantity of erotic potential I am not prepared to unpack before nine in the morning.
"Scenario nineteen," she says.
"We only discussed eighteen."
