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She showed him the pool, covered for the winter, and the pool house, and the garden where her mother grew roses every summer and swore at the deer. She showed him the old swing set her father had put up when she was little, which nobody had used in ten years and which her mother refused to take down. Drew had questions about everything, like how many acres it was, who cut all that grass, and whether they ever saw deer. She answered what she could, and he kept looking around, at the woods, the house, the lights coming on in the windows behind them one after another as somebody inside walked through and flipped them on.

Then they got to her father’s building, and Drew stopped walking.

“Can we go in?”

“Of course we can go in.”

She punched the code into the keypad by the door, the same code her father had used since she was little, her mother’s birthday. The lock clicked. She reached in and flipped the switches, and the lights came on over the court, row by row, all the way to the far end.

It was a full court, regulation size, with the hardwood polished the way her father liked it and glass backboards at both ends. There were bleachers along one wall, only five rows, because it had never been for crowds. It had been for her father, mostly, and for MJ back when he played, and for every pickup game her dad had ever put together with his old teammates, guys whose names were in the Hall of Fame next to his. Along the wall above the bleachers hung the framed jerseys, every team he’d ever played for, high school through the pros. Next to them were the photographs: her father going up for a dunk, her father with the trophy, his face wet, and her father with his arm around her mother, both of them so young it hurt to look at, her mother in a white dress at some banquet, laughing at something he’d said.

The four rings were in a glass case by the door. Drew went straight to it.

He didn’t say a word for a while. He just stood there with his face close to the glass, looking at those rings, and Nicole thought about everything he’d told her that first long night on the phone, about the Boston Garden when he was eight, and the pair of her father’s shoes in his closet back in Alabama that he still wore sometimes.

“I used to try his fadeaway,” he said finally. “In my driveway. I couldn’t hit it for shit.”

“Nobody can hit it. That’s why it’s his.”

That got a little laugh out of him. Then he looked around the court, at the hoops, the jerseys, all of it. “Does he still come out here? Now, I mean, with everything going on?”

Nicole hesitated. “Mama said he can come by if he wants. He just can’t stay.” She looked at the photograph of her parents in the white dress and the tuxedo and made herself look away. “He’s working on Christmas anyway. He’s calling the Rockets and the Magic down in Orlando.”

“Orlando.” Drew turned to her, and his face changed, lit up a little in spite of everything. “I’m gonna be in Orlando the day after Christmas.”

“I know.”

“Think he’ll still be there?”

“I don’t know, Drew.” She didn’t mean for it to come out as sharp as it did. “I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t really know anything anymore, with him and my mom. Those presents under the tree were him. He sent them because he can’t bring them himself.”

For a second Drew didn’t move. Then he came over to her and put his arms around her, coat and all, and she let him.

“Sorry,” he said into her hair. “That was a stupid thing to ask.”

“It wasn’t stupid.” She closed her eyes. “He wants to meet you. He keeps asking about you. You’d like him, Drew. You’d really like him. And he’d like you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They stayed like that in the middle of her father’s court, with all those photographs hanging over them. Then Drew let her go, walked over to the rack of balls by the bleachers, and picked one up.

He turned it over in his hands, looked at the hoop, looked at her.

“You sure you got this?” she said. “I know you’re a pro with a football and all, but this is basketball, baby.”

“I’m a quarterback, Wright. I can throw a ball through a hole.”

“That’s not what basketball is.”

He dribbled twice, badly. Then he squared up from the free-throw line, rose up the way he must have practiced a thousand times in that driveway in Boston, and let it go. The ball clanged off the front of the rim so hard it came right back to him.

Nicole laughed so hard she had to hold her stomach.

“Okay,” Drew said, catching it. “Okay. That’s the cold. My hands are cold.”

“Your hands are cold.”