Page 102 of Final Drive

“Are you racing at nationals?”

“I intend to.”

“Is the university trying to stop you?”

“The athletics department has asked me to verify my designation through the health center this week. I’m going to do it.” I keep my face still. “There’s a difference between an institution being careful and an institution being pressured. I’ll let you work out which one you’re looking at.”

“That’s a lawyer’s answer.”

“I was raised by one.”

She almost laughs. Then she puts her elbows on her knees.

“The crew,” she says. “You’re bonded to some number of them. I counted three in your boat bay last week and I’d bet the number’s gone up. Comment?”

“No.”

“Reese.”

“No.” I don’t raise my voice. “You said you needed it for your editor, so here it is. Every man on that roster is an adult and none of them signed up to be a paragraph in a story about me. Their designations, their relationships, and their private lives aren’t mine to hand you, and they aren’t yours to take. If you print speculation about any of them I’ll say publicly that you did it without a source, and I’ll be telling the truth.”

Kowalski holds my eyes.

“That’s the best answer I’ve gotten out of an athlete in a decade,” she says.

“Does that mean you’ll leave them out?”

“It means my editor gets a clean quote about why I didn’t get more.” She clicks the recorder off. “It runs Wednesday morning. Digital first, print the next day. I’ll send you the passages that quote you directly. I won’t send you the whole thing and I won’t take notes on what you think of it.”

“That’s more than I expected.”

“Don’t tell anyone.” She stands and buttons her coat, then stops with her hand on the bench. “One more thing and then I’m out of your boathouse. Nobody has ever sent me a document and then not called me. No conditions, no follow-up, not one phone number. Whoever couriered that envelope hasn’t tried to steer a single word of it.”

“He doesn’t have to. He knows what it does.”

“Maybe.” She picks up the recorder. “Or he already got what he wanted.”

She looks at me for a second longer, then goes.

I sit in the boat bay by myself after the door shuts. The four is still on the rack with a strip of tape on the bow where Zane patched it in April. Somebody’s left a cox box on the bench with the cable coiled wrong.

My phone buzzes against my leg.

Quinton: Section four is still blank. I can write it if you’re busy. No pressure either way.

I look at it until the screen goes dark, and I don’t answer.

Beckett is on the dock with his elbows on the rail, watching a single go out in the last of the light. He doesn’t turn around when I come out.

“Well?” he says.

“It runs Wednesday.”

“And?”

“And I gave her my father.”

Beckett comes off the rail. He doesn’t say anything at all, so I keep going.