Page 112 of Her Coach

“I’m not done,” I said. “I came here for my reputation. That was the plan. Rebuild, prove the point, move on. But somewhere between that first night at The Hideout and this office and every single thing that’s happened since, I stopped thinking about the plan. The plan stopped being the thing I cared most about.” I looked at her straight. “You became the thing I cared most about. And I should’ve told you that before I started building futures in my head without asking you. That was wrong. I’m telling you now.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then: “So what does that mean? For the plan.”

I picked up my phone from the desk. Pulled up my voicemail. Held it out so she could see the screen — three missed calls, 212 area code, all from the same number.

She looked at the screen. Then up at me. “How long have you been sitting on those?”

I didn’t look away from her. “Since the morning the article broke.”

Something moved through her face. Not hurt exactly. More like she was recalculating, adding up the last two days against what she now knew had been sitting in my pocket the whole time. I let her do it. She deserved the full picture before I gave her the ending.

“You could’ve told me,” she said. Quiet. Not accusatory, which somehow made it land harder.

“I know.” I held her eyes. “I should have. I was trying to figure out who I was going to be about it before I said anything to you. That’s not an excuse. It’s just what happened.”

She looked back at the phone screen for a second. Her jaw worked once, the way it did when she was deciding something.

Then she reached out and took the phone from my hand.

I watched her pull up the voicemail screen. Watched her press delete on the first one. Then the second. Then the third. She handed the phone back to me and sat back in her chair.

“There,” she said. “Now neither of us is sitting on it.”

She stared at the phone for a second longer than felt comfortable. Long enough that I started wondering if I’d miscalculated. Then she looked up at me. “You could’ve just said you were staying.”

“I could have,” I said. “But I wanted you to see it.”

She held my eyes for a long moment. Something moved through her face that I couldn’t quite name, but I felt it land somewhere in my chest like it always did when she looked at me that way. Like I was something worth looking at.

“Next time you build a future with me in it,” she said, “you ask first.”

“Noted,” I said.

She pulled her laptop back toward her and got back to work. I watched her for a second before I picked up my clipboard. The concentration face was back. Tongue just behind her teeth.

I wrote the same stat down twice again. I didn’t care.

45

BRYNN

I found out about the tire from Dani.

Which was how I found out about most things that happened in my own city, which said something about either my best friend’s surveillance capabilities or my own obliviousness. She’d seen it on Rhett’s Instagram story — grainy, low-light, the kind of thing you posted at eleven at night without thinking. His hands on a lug wrench in front of a car I recognized. My mother’s car. Parked in my mother’s driveway.

Um, Dani had texted, is your mom okay and also who is the large man at her house.

Mom was fine. I’d gotten her text before Dani’s. Everything’s fine, just couldn’t get out of the driveway, she’d said, the way she said everything was fine even when it wasn’t and occasionally when it actually was. I’d taken her at her word because Colton had his hand over mine at the kitchen table at the time and I was still recalibrating what it felt like to have someone stay.

I thought about calling her. I thought about it for about four seconds before I put my phone face down and left it there.

She had Rhett.

That was a sentence I hadn’t expected to be able to say, and I turned it over in my head the whole drive home the next morning. Mom had spent fifteen years making sure no one got close enough to need to say it. She had her work and she had the stadium and she had me, and she’d arranged those three things in a careful perimeter around the part of herself she kept for Dad and didn’t let anyone else near. I’d watched it happen in real time for years. I’d tried to dismantle it from the outside and gotten nowhere. And then Rhett had just walked through the perimeter like it wasn’t there. Like he hadn’t noticed it. Like he was just a man who knew how she took her coffee and showed up when her tire was flat.

I didn’t know what to do with that except feel something ease in my chest that had been tight for a very long time.

The stadium was quiet when I came in. Early enough that the ice still had the morning chill on it, that particular cold that settled into the arena before the day started and before bodies filled it up with noise and heat. I’d loved that smell my whole life. The sharpened-blade smell, the cold-concrete smell. My father’s smell, even though he’d been gone long enough now that I’d stopped being surprised when something brought him back.