27. Xander
XANDER
My nerves were fucking shot.
For the third time in ten minutes, I paced my penthouse living room, from kitchen island to the windows. Leo perched on a barstool, pretending to care about his phone instead of my mental breakdown.
“She should’ve called by now,” I said, checking my watch again. “It’s been almost two hours.”
Leo glanced up. “She said she’d call when it was done.”
“What if something went wrong?” My words stuck like peanut butter. “What if Hank figured her out? What if?—”
“Xander.” Leo cut me off. “Tara knows her shit. She’s not some helpless princess. She’s a badass with a plan.”
He was right, but my brain kept playing disaster movies starring Tara and her father. I’d faced Diego Mano’s mobsters yesterday, but Tara alone with her dad froze my blood in ways Torres’s goons couldn’t touch.
“Should’ve gone with her,” I muttered.
“And done what?” Leo dropped his phone. “Hidden in the bushes? Climbed the walls like Spiderman? Get real.”
My phone buzzed. I pounced on it.
On my way. I got it.
Relief hit me, and I collapsed onto the nearest chair.
“She did it,” I told Leo, my voice tiny. “She got the confession.”
Leo’s eyebrows jumped. “Holy shit. She actually pulled it off.”
“Never doubted her,” I lied, suddenly floating.
“Bullshit. You nearly wore through your shoes,” Leo fired back, grinning.
The next twenty minutes dragged on like a snail race. I tried emails, social media, anything to avoid staring at the door. Failed miserably.
When the knock came, I nearly broke my neck getting there. I yanked it open to find Tara—pale but fierce-eyed.
“You did it,” I said, pulling her inside and against me in one move.
She held on tight, shaking slightly. When she stepped back, her face told the real story.
“I’m okay,” she said, glancing past me to Leo. “I got everything. The confession, Morrison, Brittany, Diego—all of it.”
“Let’s hear it,” Leo said, suddenly serious.
Tara pulled out her phone. We moved to the couch while she remained standing, too wired to sit.
“Fair warning,” she said, finger hovering over play, “this is fucked up.”
I grabbed her hand. “We’re in this together.”
The recording started with background noise, then Hank’s voice. As I listened to him casually admit to bribing Detective Morrison, framing me, and orchestrating my Miami return just to destroy me, my stomach twisted.
“I did it all for you, Tara.”
When it ended, we sat in shocked silence.
“Jesus Christ,” Leo finally muttered.
I couldn’t speak. A decade of guilt and self-destruction—all because of this twisted fuck and his warped idea of fatherly love.
“It’s enough, right?” Tara asked. “To prove what he did?”
I nodded. “It’s a goddamn smoking gun.”
“So where do we go from here?” Leo asked. “Cops?”
Tara shook her head. “He owns half the department.”
“The league then,” I suggested. “MLS ethics committee?”
“Same problem,” Tara countered. “Too many connections. He’d bury us in legal bullshit for years.”
She was right. Hank didn’t get where he was playing fair.
“Then what?” I asked, frustration bubbling up. “What good is the truth if nobody will hear it?”
Leo straightened suddenly. “We go public.”
We both turned to him.
“How?” Tara asked.
“Fuck official channels. We create a media shitstorm too big to contain.”
The idea terrified and excited me. “How would that even work?”
Leo’s eyes lit up. “I know journalists who’d kill for this dirt. Give them everything and watch it explode. Once it’s out, Hank can’t control it.”
“Career suicide,” Tara said quietly.
“Not if we control the story,” Leo argued. “You’re the whistleblower who exposed daddy’s corruption. That makes you the hero.”
I looked at Tara. “Your call. Your father.”
She thought for a moment, then met my eyes. “He stopped being my father when he chose his reputation over Jimmy’s truth. Over us.” Her voice hardened. “Let’s burn him down.”
Leo grabbed his phone. “I know exactly who to call.”
The next twenty-four hours were a blur. Leo, in full crisis-manager mode, set up a meet with a journalist named Gabriela Reyes.
“She’s the one,” he said as we drove to some quiet, upscale joint in Coral Gables. “Big-time investigative reporter. Wrote a piece a few years back questioning Hank’s business practices, and he got her blackballed from some local circles.”
Tara was sitting beside me in the back seat, her knee pressed against mine. “So she has a grudge,” she said.
“So she’ll be thorough,” Leo corrected. “She won’t run with a story this big unless it’s bulletproof. And ours is.”
Tara squeezed my hand, her touch sending a jolt of electricity straight through me. “You ready for this?” she asked, her voice low, just for me. “Once this door opens, it doesn’t close.”
I looked at her. At this woman who had been a ghost in my past, then the architect of my present, and now… now she was the only thing that felt real for the future. The only thing I wasn't willing to lose.
“For an eternity, I’ve been running from that night,” I said, my voice rough. “I’m done running.”
The restaurant was quiet. The host led us to a private room where a woman with sharp, intelligent eyes was waiting. She looked like she could smell bullshit from a mile away.
“Ms. Reyes,” Leo said.
She nodded at him, but her eyes were on us. “Dr. Swanson. Mr. McCrae. Leo says you have a story that’s going to make my year.”
We sat, and for the next two hours, we let it all spill out.
The whole damn, ugly, fucked-up saga. Tara laid out the timeline, and I filled in the gaps with the raw, messy emotion of it.
Gabriela just listened, her expression unreadable, occasionally cutting in with a question so sharp it could draw blood.
When we finally finished, the silence in the room was deafening.
“That,” she said, leaning back in her chair, “is one hell of an allegation.”
“It’s the truth,” I said, maybe a little too forcefully.
“Proof?”
Tara slid a small USB drive across the polished table.
It looked tiny and insignificant, but it was a damn bomb.
“It’s all on there,” she said, her voice pure steel.
“The recording of my father’s full confession.
Morrison’s original notes on Jimmy’s death.
A sworn affidavit from Diego Mano detailing the harassment campaign.
And financial records proving the payments to Brittany Ashworth. ”
Tara had snapped a picture of a receipt before her father busted her in his study. Turned out to be the smoking gun payment to Brittany. Cory tracked the money trail perfectly.
Gabriela picked up the drive. “You understand what you’re doing, right? This doesn’t just burn your father. It could burn the whole team. It will definitely burn you.” She looked from me to Tara. “You ready for the hurricane?”
I didn’t have to think. I looked at Tara, at the unshakeable strength in her eyes, and felt my own resolve harden. We were in this together. That was the only thing that mattered.
“Let it rain,” I said.
She tucked the drive into her bag. “I’ll need to verify everything, of course.”
“Of course,” Leo said.
“If this all checks out…” She let out a low whistle. “This is the kind of story that ends careers. Plural.” She held our gaze. “I’ll ask you one last time. This is going to be a media tsunami. Your lives will be picked apart by strangers. Are you absolutely sure?”
“What we want,” Tara said, her voice steady and clear, “is for the truth to come out. For my brother finally getting peace.”
I reached for her hand under the table, our fingers lacing together. A silent promise. Whatever came next, we’d face it.
Gabriela nodded, a flicker of something like respect in her eyes. “I’ll be in touch. Soon.”
The call came three days later. Three days of living on a knife's edge, of every phone buzz sending a jolt through my system. Three days of Tara and me existing in our own bubble, a pocket of calm before the hurricane we had summoned.
“It’s done,” Gabriela told me, her voice all business. “Story goes live tomorrow morning. 6 AM sharp. It’s going to be a firestorm.”
I ended the call, my heart hammering against my ribs. The point of no return.
I called Tara immediately. “It’s happening,” was all I had to say.
“I’m on my way,” she said.
By nightfall, the penthouse had become our command center. Leo brought takeout, but none of us had much of an appetite. The air was thick with a strange, electric tension—the feeling of standing on a cliff, about to jump.
Around midnight, when the silence had stretched too long, Tara’s voice cut through it. “I keep thinking about Jimmy,” she said softly.
I found her hand in the dark. “He’d be proud of you, Tara. For fighting for the truth.”
“I just wish…” Her voice broke. “I wish I’d known how much he was hurting.”
I pulled her into my arms, her head fitting perfectly under my chin. “Hey. You were a kid. His sickness was never your fault.” I felt her nod against my chest. “And I’ve been blaming myself for a choice he made. We’ve both been carrying ghosts that weren't ours to hold.”
We didn’t sleep much. We just held each other, a silent promise that whatever came with the dawn, we’d face it together.
It felt like I’d just closed my eyes when Leo was banging on the door. “It’s 5:45. Time to go.”
We stumbled into the living room. Leo had ESPN on, the volume low. Tara’s hand found mine, her grip so tight I could feel her pulse, a frantic rhythm that matched my own. The seconds ticked by like hours. 5:58… 5:59…
And then, at 6:00 AM, the world exploded.
The morning anchor’s face filled the screen, her expression grim.
“We begin with a breaking story sending shockwaves through the world of professional sports. An exclusive ESPN investigation has uncovered a decade-long conspiracy of bribery and manipulation orchestrated by Miami Pirates FC owner, Hank Swanson…”
The first headline scrolled across the bottom of the screen: ALEXANDER MCCRAE VINDICATED IN 2013 FATAL ACCIDENT.
The words blurred. A sound escaped my throat, something between a laugh and a sob. Twelve years. Twelve years of carrying the weight of being a killer, of believing I had stolen my best friend’s life. And in a single sentence, it was gone.
Tara squeezed my hand, her eyes shining with tears as she looked at me.
On screen, they showed a picture of a younger, smiling Jimmy, then cut to the recording of Hank’s voice, cold and clear, filling the room. “I covered it up to protect you. From the pain of knowing your brother chose to leave you.”
A small, wounded sound escaped Tara’s lips, and I pulled her tight against my side, a white-hot rage flaring on her behalf.
The anchor continued, “The recording also contains Swanson’s confession that he orchestrated McCrae’s multi-million-dollar transfer to Miami not to improve the team, but as part of a cruel, elaborate scheme to destroy McCrae’s reputation and permanently separate him from his daughter…”
My phone, sitting on the coffee table, began to vibrate. Then it didn’t stop. It buzzed and lit up with a relentless flood of notifications, a tidal wave of texts and calls. The story was everywhere. My brother Sean. Cory. Teammates. Old friends from London.
Leo turned up the volume. “The league has announced an emergency meeting… major sponsors are releasing statements…”
He looked up from his own phone, a grim smile on his face. “It’s working. It’s too big to kill. Every major outlet has it. It’s the number one trend worldwide.”
I looked at Tara. Her face was a canvas of conflicting emotions—grief for the father she thought she had, relief for the truth, and a fierce, undeniable strength.
“You okay?” I asked softly.
She nodded, a single tear tracing a path down her cheek. “He can’t hurt us anymore.”
The story kept unfolding. Gabriela had done her homework. They detailed the payments to Diego. They ran a deep dive into Brittany Ashworth’s history, complete with a photo of her and the baby’s actual father, exposing the paternity scheme as just another one of Hank’s vicious little plots.
My phone buzzed with a text. It was from Ben Carter. The whole team’s talking. We got your back, man. Always did.
Another came through from a number I didn’t recognize, but the message was unmistakable. Diego. I owe you. I’ll make it right.
The truth was out. All of it. The weight wasn’t just lifted; it was annihilated. Hank’s empire was crumbling on live television, and in its place, Tara and I were finally free to build our own future.