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Granddad.
I stop reading.
For several seconds, I can't continue.
There's a photograph embedded halfway down the page.
Not the one from my drawer.
She wouldn't use that without permission.
A public one.
Granddad and me at a rugby match. I'm younger. He's laughing. I'm looking at the field.
Layla writes about rugby being the language my grandfather and I shared.
About a boy who learned the sport sitting beside the man he loved most.
About the dream that started long before Knight Global became what it is today.
She never makes Granddad pathetic. Never turns grief into clickbait. Never makes me pathetic either.
She simply lets the reader understand.
The Carolina Rovers aren't a billionaire's vanity project.
They're a promise.
A piece of my grandfather I could build instead of bury.
And then—
Jesus Christ.
She writes about me.
Not the billionaire.
Me.
The man who remembers details. The owner who knows his players. The businessman who spends money on things because sometimes profit isn't measured on a balance sheet.
She doesn't make me a saint.
Thank fuck.
She points out my obsession with control.
My hostility toward invasive questions. My tendency to assume information is safer when I possess all of it.
There's a line about my arrogance that makes me snort despite myself.
Then she writes about loyalty.
About the Rovers.
About how the franchise has become something larger than a business because the man who bought it refused to treat it like one.
