Notincredible.Notfearless.Notamazingorbrilliantorelectricor any of the words I've been collecting since I was fourteen years old like a woman stockpiling currency against the fear that she might one day be unremarkable.
Disciplined.
A word that means I did not do the exciting thing. I did the correct thing. And the woman standing beside the green is telling me, in her low, precise, unperformative voice, that the correct thing is worthy of praise.
My throat tightens. I nod. Walk to the seventeenth tee. My hands are steady. My breathing is even. My body feels calibrated in a way I do not recognize as myself.
I birdie seventeen from sixteen feet. I par eighteen with a textbook approach and two solid putts.
I shoot sixty-six. Five under par. The best round of my season by four strokes.
I finish the tournament tied for sixth.
•
Post-tournament. The media center is bright and noisy, and I give a twelve-minute interview that I perform on autopilot because the part of my brain that generates public-facing Tala is running fine while the rest of me is somewhere else entirely.
The somewhere else is the corridor of the Kiawah resort hotel at nine forty-seven in the evening.
I've showered. Changed into a dark silk shirt and loose trousers and bare feet because I'm not going outside and shoes feel like a commitment I can't make right now. My hair is damp. I smell like the hotel shampoo, which is aggressively botanical.
Nerys's room is three doors down. I know this because I watched her keycard flash when she opened it earlier, and my brain recorded the room number the way it records pin positions — automatically, with a precision that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with want.
I stand in the corridor. The carpet is soft. The lighting is warm. The ice machine hums around the corner.
I walk three doors.
I raise my hand to knock.
I don't knock. My hand stays in the air. My heartbeat is in my wrist. My chest. My ears.
What am I doing?
I'm standing barefoot in a hotel corridor about to knock on the door of the woman my sponsors hired to fix my career. The woman who is seventeen years older than me and six inches taller and so controlled she makes marble look fidgety. The woman who saiddisciplinedin a voice that made my entire body change frequency.
What am I doing?
I'm doing the aggressive thing. The Tala thing. The thing where the excitement overwhelms the strategy and I swingbefore I've finished the backswing and the shot either succeeds spectacularly or destroys everything.
I should go back to my room.
I knock.
Twelve seconds. The door opens.
Nerys is in a soft gray T-shirt and dark trousers and bare feet. Her hair is loose — not pushed behind her ears, not controlled, just falling around her jaw in a way I haven't seen before. The silver streak catches the corridor light.
She doesn't look surprised. She looks like a woman who heard my footsteps three doors away and decided to answer.
"Tala."
"I played well today."
"You played intelligently today. That's better."
"Because of you."
"Because of us. That's the point of a team."
