Page 2 of Her Coach

“What do you want me to do?” Dave asked. Real question, not rhetorical. That was the thing about Dave. Fifteen years and he still asked before he moved.

“Nothing tonight,” I said. “Let it breathe. Don’t confirm, don’t deny, don’t return Chen’s calls until morning.”

“And if they push?”

“Tell them I’m unavailable.”

“Colton —”

“Good night, Dave.”

I hung up before he could finish the sentence.

I stood there for a moment. The noise from the ballroom filtered through the wall, glasses clinking, someone laughing too loud, the low swell of a string quartet playing something I didn’t recognize. Three hundred people who had no idea that forty feet away, the head coach of the New York Titans was watching twenty years of work start to come apart at the seams.

I put my phone back in my jacket pocket. Walked back into the ballroom. Set my bourbon glass on the nearest tray and spent the next forty-five minutes shaking hands and making small talk and doing the thing I had always been good at, holding my face completely still while everything underneath was going to shit.

Nobody knew. Not yet.

I took a car home at midnight. The driver didn’t talk, which I appreciated. The city slid past the window, indifferent and lit up and not interested in what was happening to any one person inside it. I got out in front of my building without tipping as well as I should have.

My apartment was dark. I didn’t turn the lights on.

I sat at the kitchen table with my jacket still on and my phone face down in front of me. Outside, the city hummed. Somewhere across town, a story with my name in it was already moving to every screen that mattered.

I turned the phone over at twelve forty-seven. Nineteen new notifications. I turned it back over.

Then I got up, poured a bourbon, sat back down, and waited for morning.

2

BRYNN

The Hideout smelled like spilled beer and old wood and something fried in the kitchen, which meant it smelled like home.

I had picked up four shifts this week, which was one more than usual, and if my best friend Dani asked I was going to tell her it was because Marco needed the coverage. That was true. It was also true that being behind this bar was the only time my brain reliably shut up, and this week my brain had been particularly loud.

I grabbed a glass off the rack and started filling an order. Dark brew, local tap, poured at an angle the way Dad always said a dark should be poured. Mom was the one who had actually taught me that. But the memory was his.

I had been thinking about him a lot lately.

Not in a spiral way. Just in the way you thought about someone when you kept watching someone else refuse to stop grieving them.

Mom had been at the arena until eight the night before. I knew because Moose had forgotten his water bottle and texted me about the lights still being on in the office hallway when he went back for it. I had not replied to that text because there was nothing to say that I hadn’t already said to her directly and gotten exactly nowhere with.

She was not going to stop sitting at his desk. She was not going to stop using his computer. She was not going to stop coming to that arena at seven in the morning and staying until the cleaning crew gave her pointed looks on their way out at night.

I knew this. I had known this for fourteen months, which was how long I had been back in Las Vegas telling myself I would leave again once she was okay.

The problem was defining okay.

“Bry.” Moose materialized at the end of the bar like a six-foot-four storm in practice gear. “Please tell me there is food left.”

“Kitchen closes in ten minutes.”

He planted both hands on the bar. “Bry.”

“Go.” I jerked my chin toward the kitchen window. “Tell Sal I sent you.”