Page 92 of Final Drive

“Worse than that.” Gray finally looks up, and there’s nothing left in his face to read. “At Riverside they wanted paperwork before a race. This goes to Carmine’s desk as a compliance question, and Carmine already had one open on Reese after yesterday.”

“Kinsley,” Beckett says.

“She opened the door. My father walked through it.” Gray straightens. “That’s what I came back to tell you.”

“Fourteen hours, and that’s the briefing.”

“Yes.”

“You said you’d be back last night.”

“I did.” His hands come off the counter. “Reese, I’m not going to stand in this kitchen and give you a version of that conversation. I’ll tell you everything when it’s finished.”

“When what’s finished?”

He picks his keys back up.

“Don’t,” Bo says quietly. “Not right now. Look at her.”

Gray looks at me. He takes in the shirt that isn’t mine, Eli’s mark on the side of my neck and Bo’s fresh at the back of it, and my left hand where Tyler’s bite sits dark over the pulse. Six of them, and none of them his. He shuts his eyes for a second longer than a blink.

“I know,” he says. “I’m aware of every one of them.”

He goes upstairs. Nobody follows him.

Bo hands me coffee. I hold it without drinking it, and I understand for the first time that I am angrier at Gray Lockwood than I have ever been at anyone in my life, including my mother, including Davis, including Quinton.

Because he keeps deciding things about me in rooms I’m not in.

The email comes at 8:06.

Ms. Callahan: Please report to Room 112, Athletics Administration, at 10:00 this morning regarding a matter of competitive eligibility. Coach Bennett has been asked to attend. You may bring an advisor. C. Carmine, Assistant Director.

Tyler reads it over my shoulder and doesn’t say anything, and from Tyler that’s a report in itself.

“It’s Saturday,” I say.

“I know.”

“Nobody schedules a weekend meeting about a thing that can wait.”

“No, they don’t.” He hands my phone back. “She put advisor in there. She didn’t have to. Take Eli, since he’s the only one of us who won’t say anything he hasn’t already decided to say.”

Room 112 has a conference table meant for twelve. Carmine on one side with a folder. Bennett beside her with his ball cap in his hands, which I’ve never seen him do indoors. Eli on my left with a legal pad and a pen he hasn’t uncapped.

“Thank you for coming in on short notice,” Carmine says.

“Did I have a choice?”

“No.” She opens the folder. “I’d rather not waste your morning, so I’ll be plain. The athletics department received two communications yesterday. One from the Title IX office, forwarding the panel’s finding in your favor and noting for the record that your designation was disclosed during the proceeding. The other from an alumnus, asking whether your registration status has ever been verified against your current biology.”

“Harrison Lockwood.”

Carmine doesn’t confirm it. She also doesn’t blink.

“University records list you as Undifferentiated,” she says. “That registration was filed when you were sixteen, by your father, and it was legal at the time. It isn’t fraud. I want that on the table before anything else, since I expect you’ve been treating it as one.”

I don’t answer that.