Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Reese
Iwake up in Tyler’s bed with his hand closed around my bitten wrist and the front door banging open downstairs.
“He’s home,” he says.
By the time I get down the stairs in Tyler’s shirt, most of the house is in the kitchen. Bo has coffee going. Jackson is standing at the counter with his arms crossed. Beckett is on a barstool in yesterday’s clothes, and I don’t think he ever came in off the porch.
Gray is in the doorway in the suit he left in.
He hasn’t been to bed. The tie is pulled loose, there’s a coffee stain on the cuff, and he’s carrying his keys in his fist instead of his pocket.
“Where were you,” I say.
“Home.” He corrects it. “The house.”
“All night.”
“Most of it. I sat in the car in the drive after.” He sets his keys on the counter and puts both hands flat on either side of them. “Harrison called the athletic department yesterday afternoon. Before we were out of the hearing.”
Bo turns the burner off.
“He’s been on the phone with the development office since the start of the week,” Gray says.
“Three generations of Lockwoods on that boathouse. He’s put it to them plainly that the family’s continued support depends on how the department handles what he’s calling a conduct problem in the men’s program. ”
“He’s threatening the money,” Tyler says from the stairs.
“Nothing that direct. He’s discussing it with them. That’s the entire skill.” Gray still hasn’t looked at me. “And then he told them he was concerned, as an alumnus and a parent, that a member of the men’s roster may have competed under a designation registration that doesn’t reflect her status.”
The kitchen goes very quiet.
“He named me,” I say.
“He didn’t have to. There’s one woman on the roster.”
Zane comes in from the hall and stops when he reads the room.
“So we’ve been here before,” Bo says.
“Worse than that.” Gray finally looks up, and there’s nothing left in his face to read. “At Riverside they wanted paperwork before a race. This goes to Carmine’s desk as a compliance question, and Carmine already had one open on Reese after yesterday.”
“Kinsley,” Beckett says.
“She opened the door. My father walked through it.” Gray straightens. “That’s what I came back to tell you.”
“Fourteen hours, and that’s the briefing.”
“Yes.”
“You said you’d be back last night.”
“I did.” His hands come off the counter. “Reese, I’m not going to stand in this kitchen and give you a version of that conversation. I’ll tell you everything when it’s finished.”
“When what’s finished?”
He picks his keys back up.
“Don’t,” Bo says quietly. “Not right now. Look at her.”
Gray looks at me. He takes in the shirt that isn’t mine, Eli’s mark on the side of my neck and Bo’s fresh at the back of it, and my left hand where Tyler’s bite sits dark over the pulse. Six of them, and none of them his. He shuts his eyes for a second longer than a blink.
“I know,” he says. “I’m aware of every one of them.”
He goes upstairs. Nobody follows him.
Bo hands me coffee. I hold it without drinking it, and I understand for the first time that I am angrier at Gray Lockwood than I have ever been at anyone in my life, including my mother, including Davis, including Quinton.
Because he keeps deciding things about me in rooms I’m not in.
The email comes at 8:06.
Ms. Callahan: Please report to Room 112, Athletics Administration, at 10:00 this morning regarding a matter of competitive eligibility. Coach Bennett has been asked to attend. You may bring an advisor. C. Carmine, Assistant Director.
Tyler reads it over my shoulder and doesn’t say anything, and from Tyler that’s a report in itself.
“It’s Saturday,” I say.
“I know.”
“Nobody schedules a weekend meeting about a thing that can wait.”
“No, they don’t.” He hands my phone back. “She put advisor in there. She didn’t have to. Take Eli, since he’s the only one of us who won’t say anything he hasn’t already decided to say.”
Room 112 has a conference table meant for twelve. Carmine on one side with a folder. Bennett beside her with his ball cap in his hands, which I’ve never seen him do indoors. Eli on my left with a legal pad and a pen he hasn’t uncapped.
“Thank you for coming in on short notice,” Carmine says.
“Did I have a choice?”
“No.” She opens the folder. “I’d rather not waste your morning, so I’ll be plain.
The athletics department received two communications yesterday.
One from the Title IX office, forwarding the panel’s finding in your favor and noting for the record that your designation was disclosed during the proceeding.
The other from an alumnus, asking whether your registration status has ever been verified against your current biology. ”
“Harrison Lockwood.”
Carmine doesn’t confirm it. She also doesn’t blink.
“University records list you as Undifferentiated,” she says. “That registration was filed when you were sixteen, by your father, and it was legal at the time. It isn’t fraud. I want that on the table before anything else, since I expect you’ve been treating it as one.”
I don’t answer that.
“The problem isn’t the filing. The problem is that AVNC requires member institutions to certify roster eligibility, and Sable Ridge’s certification of you rests on a registration that the university now has documented reason to believe is out of date.
” She turns a page. “The remedy available to us is verification through the student health center. Blood panel, designation markers. It takes an afternoon.”
“And then it’s in my file forever.”
“Yes.”
“And every school we race against can request it.”
“Under certain conditions, yes.” She closes the folder.
“Ms. Callahan, I’m not going to insult you by pretending this is neutral.
If you verify, you row at nationals as a registered Omega on a men’s roster and every governing body in this sport gets to have an opinion about it.
If you decline, I can’t certify you, and you don’t row. ”
Bennett shifts in his chair.
“There’s a third thing,” Carmine says, “and I’d rather you hear it from me. Dean Morrison’s order from the spring requires all pack bonds to be registered with the health center by the end of the month. You have six. Registering them accomplishes the designation verification on its own.”
“So either way I walk into the same building.”
“Yes.” She almost smiles. “The difference is whether you go because I made you or because you decided to.”
Eli sets his pen down.
“That’s not a difference in outcome,” he says. “That’s a difference in narrative.”
“Mr. Stone, in my experience, narrative is most of the outcome.”
Bennett puts his cap on the table.
“Can I say something,” he says.
“This isn’t a discussion, Coach.”
“Then I’ll be quick.” He rubs a hand over his face. “Before nationals I sign the roster certification. It says every athlete I’m entering is eligible to race. My signature goes on it. Not the department’s, not yours.”
“I’ve seen the form.”
“Then you know that if her registration gets overturned six months from now, I’m the one who certified a rower who shouldn’t have been in the boat.
That ends my career. It doesn’t touch yours.
” He looks at Carmine steadily. “So I want it said out loud in this room. Is the department telling me to leave her name off it?”
Carmine takes long enough to answer that I get my first real read on her.
“You’re not being asked anything,” she says. “By me.”
“By somebody.”
“The development office has expressed a preference that this program not appear in a wire story next month.”
“That’s a hell of a way to say it.”
“It’s the only phrasing I’m permitted.”
Bennett picks his cap back up and puts it on.
“I’m signing the form,” he says.
“Coach.”
“I’ve had one crew in thirty years that rowed like that boat rows. One.” He stands. “You tell whoever’s asking that I’ll sign it with her name on it, and if the department wants a different signature they can go get themselves a different coach before the seventeenth.”
He leaves. The door doesn’t slam. It clicks, and I think about Gray’s car in the drive.
Carmine looks at the closed door for a second longer than she needs to.
“Get the blood work done,” she says. “This week. If you’re going to be an Omega in that boat at nationals, be one on paper first, where I can defend it.”
Outside, there’s a frisbee game on the quad and somebody’s dog running the length of it.
“She helped you in there,” Eli says.
“She helped the department. It just happened to overlap.” I put my sunglasses on. “For now.”
“Reese.” He stops walking. “Bennett just put his career in front of a bus in a room with a witness. That wasn’t nothing.”
“I know what it was.”
“Then say it out loud sometime where he can hear it.”
My phone buzzes in my hand. An unknown number with a 704 area code.
Reese, this is Jenna Kowalski, Southeastern Sports Network. I’ve been given a document about your registration status by someone who isn’t on your side. I’m going to have to write something. I’d rather write it with you than around you. 20 minutes, your terms, on the record or off. J.K.
I read it three times standing in the middle of the quad.
“What,” Eli says.
I hand him the phone.
He reads it and hands it back, and for once Eli Stone doesn’t have a plan ready.
“That’s Harrison,” he says.
“His two weeks are up. He said he’d put it in the press if Gray didn’t come home.” I look at the date on my phone screen. “That was twelve days ago.”
“You don’t have to answer her today.”
“If I don’t answer her, she writes it from the document.” I’m already typing. “And the document came from Harrison Lockwood, who needs me to be a liability.”
“Reese.”
“He’s going to publish either way, Eli. The only thing left to decide is whose sentences it’s in.”
I stop before I hit send. I stand there in the sun with my thumb over the screen, since the last time I let somebody else tell my story it was Andrea Sloan, and I had to transfer schools to get out from under it.
Nobody in that kitchen this morning knows I’m doing this. Gray is upstairs making a decision about me in a room I’m not in.
I hit send.
Tomorrow, 4pm, on the record. I pick the location. I want the questions in advance and I’m not answering anything about the other eight. R.C.
Her reply takes ninety seconds.
Done. And for what it’s worth, the person who sent me the document didn’t send it under his own name.
I put the phone in my pocket.
“You’re going to do it,” Eli says.
“Tomorrow afternoon.” I start walking again, toward the boathouse, since there’s practice at two and a race next weekend that I intend to win. “And I’m telling all of them tonight. Before, not after.”
Eli catches up.
“That’s new,” he says.
“It’s the only part of this I get to pick.”