Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Gray
I’ve been upstairs since eight this morning. By the time I come down, the whole house is in the living room waiting on me.
Reese is standing. That’s the first thing I register. She’s had a full day of Carmine, Bennett, and whatever happened on the quad afterward. Now she’s on her feet in front of eight men with her arms at her sides, since she called this meeting.
“Sit down,” she says.
I take the chair nearest the door.
“I’m giving an interview tomorrow. Southeastern Sports Network, four o’clock, on the record. I picked the location and I have the questions in advance. Harrison sent them my registration file. Kowalski’s writing it either way.”
The room comes apart in three directions. Zane says her name. Jackson stands up. Beckett gets as far as absolutely not before Bo puts a hand on his chest without looking at him.
“No,” I say. “You’re handing a reporter your designation, your medical history, and your father’s paperwork. In print, under your name, eight days before nationals. Carmine has to defend you to a governing body next week. You’re making her job impossible.”
“Harder. Not impossible. She’ll manage.”
“Reese.”
“You want me to wait.” She doesn’t pause for an answer. “Sit on it, let you and Tyler work the angles, see what shakes out. That’s the play. Quiet, controlled, handled by people who know how these rooms work.”
“Yes.”
“That’s how I lost Westlake.”
Nobody says anything.
“I let Andrea write it. I was quiet, I was reasonable, and I waited for the adults to sort it out.” Her voice stays level.
“By the time anybody asked me what happened, everyone already knew what happened. I’m not doing it again.
I’m telling you before instead of after, and I’m not asking permission.
I’m telling you since you’re mine and you deserve to hear it from me first.”
Tyler takes his glasses off.
“Okay,” Bo says.
Zane nods at the floor. “Yeah.”
Cameron nods once from the doorway.
I sit there in my father’s posture, in my father’s silence, and I understand what I’ve been doing all week.
She’s standing in a room full of people telling them the truth before she acts on it. I’ve been driving out to Ravenswood alone in the dark, then coming home with edited highlights.
Harrison would call mine managing the exposure. He’d be proud of it. He taught it to me at a dinner table before I was ten years old.
“I have to go out,” I say.
Jackson’s head comes up. “Are you serious?”
“Gray.” Reese’s voice has an edge on it. “Not again.”
“I’ll be back tonight.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“I know what I said.” I get my keys. “This time I’ll tell you all of it.”
Ravenswood is forty minutes north. I drive it with the windows down, since the noise stops me rehearsing what I’m going to say, and rehearsing is how he wins.
The house has eleven rooms nobody uses. My mother is at a board thing in Charlotte. The staff have gone home. My father is in the study with a fire going in May, since he likes the room warm, and he doesn’t stand up when I come in.
“You came back,” he says.
“You knew I would.”
“I hoped.” He closes the folder in front of him. “Sit.”
I don’t.
“Suit yourself.” He leans back. “I’ll assume you’ve heard from the athletics department by now, so we can skip the part where you accuse me of things.”
“That’s fine.”
“Good.” He steadies his eyes on me. “The compliance officer has a problem. He has a coxswain whose registration doesn’t match her biology and a captain who’s bonded to her.
He can’t unpick which of you knew what, and he doesn’t want to try.
The cheapest thing available to him is scratching the pair. Both of you. It removes the question.”
I don’t move.
“That isn’t a threat, Gray. That’s arithmetic. He’ll get there on his own by the middle of the week.” He turns his hand over. “Unless somebody with standing tells him the family’s concerns have been addressed.”
“You.”
“Me.” He says it without any weight on it.
“One phone call. The complaint gets characterized as a misunderstanding between an alumnus and the department. Your coxswain races. You race. Bennett signs his form, keeps his license. Nobody’s career ends over a piece of paperwork her father filed when she was sixteen. ”
The fire pops. He waits.
“And?”
“And you withdraw from the arrangement. You take the position at the firm in June, you live at the Charlotte property, and you stop appearing in photographs with seven other men and one girl.” He says girl without emphasis, which lands worse than emphasis would.
“I’m not asking you to stop caring for her.
I’m asking you to stop making her your public problem.
You’d be doing her a kindness. She’d have her season. ”
He’s the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve watched him do this to men twice my age across boardroom tables.
He hasn’t raised his voice once. He’s built me a version of losing that sounds like winning, with the cost on me and the benefit on her, so refusing makes me the one who took nationals away from her.
A week ago I’d have taken it. I’d have driven home, told them Harrison had backed off, and carried the rest myself.
“I need to make a call,” I say.
A muscle goes at the corner of his mouth. It’s gone before I can read it.
“By all means.”
I go out through the French doors onto the terrace. It’s full dark, and the lawn runs down to a tree line with nothing behind it but frogs.
She picks up on the second ring.
“Where are you?”
“Ravenswood.” I put my back against the stone. “I’m going to tell you exactly what he offered. Then I’m not going to answer him. You are.”
She takes a second. “Say it.”
I say all of it. The scratch, the arithmetic, the phone call, the firm, Charlotte, and the word girl. I don’t shape it. I don’t leave out the part where it works. When I finish I can hear her breathing on the other end and nothing else.
“He’s offering me my season,” she says.
“Yes.”
“For you.”
“For me leaving. Yes.”
“And you called me.”
“I’m standing on his terrace with the phone in my hand and I haven’t told him anything.” My voice isn’t steady. “This is the room, Reese. I’m putting you in it.”
The silence runs long enough that I check the screen.
“Gray.”
“I’m here.”
“If you take that deal I’ll row at nationals. I’ll win.” Her voice cracks straight down the middle. “And I’ll spend the rest of my life knowing the only reason I got to was that a man decided for me what I could afford to lose. Don’t you dare buy me my season.”
“That’s not an instruction.”
“Tell him no.”
“Reese.”
“Tell him no, Gray. Then come home.”
I stand out there a second after she hangs up, with the frogs still going and the light from the study falling across the flagstones in a long yellow rectangle.
Then I go back in.
“No,” I say.
My father looks at me for the better part of a minute.
“Think carefully.”
“I did. I called her and asked. That’s the part you won’t understand, so I’ll only say it once.” I put my keys in my pocket. “You’ve never asked anyone in your life. Not my mother, not me, and not her.”
“You’re twenty-two.”
“I’m the stroke seat of a boat that’s going to win a national championship in eight days. After that I’m a man with a degree, no job, no trust, and eight people who’d stand in front of a car for me.” I hear how it sounds. I don’t care. “You have one thing I want. I’m not paying for it.”
He nods slowly. He isn’t angry. That’s the part nobody believes when I describe him.
“All right,” he says.
“That’s it?”
“What did you expect? Shouting?” He opens the folder again.
“You’ve made a decision with your eyes open.
I’ve no interest in a scene. The accounts close at the end of the month.
Your mother will want to speak with you at some point, and I’d ask you to take her call.
The Charlotte property was never in your name. ”
“I know.”
“Then there’s nothing else.” He picks up his pen. “Drive carefully. The road out is dark.”
I make it three miles before I have to pull onto the shoulder. I sit there with my hands on the wheel and the hazards going, and I cry for about ninety seconds. Then I stop, and I put the car back in gear.
The porch light is on when I get there. All of them are up. Nobody says a word to me. Bo hands me a beer I don’t open. Zane puts a plate in my hands and takes it back when he sees my face. Tyler says “You should eat,” and I say “Later,” and that’s the entire conversation.
Reese is on the stairs.
She’s in a t-shirt and nothing else I can see. Her hair’s down over the bite at her nape. She’s got one hand wrapped around the newel post, and she doesn’t let go of it when I come in.
“You told him no.”
“He closes the accounts at the end of the month. The Charlotte house was never in my name. He asked me to take my mother’s call when it comes.”
Her grip on the post doesn’t change.
“That’s all of it?”
“It took less than five minutes. He never raised his voice.” I get to the bottom of the stairs. “I’ve got one thing to say and I’d rather say it here in front of everyone, since that’s how you did it.”
Beckett starts to get up until Bo puts a hand out, and he sits back down.
“I’ve made every decision about you at a distance,” I say.
“Every one. The gala, my father, the department, tonight. I did it since I could carry it better than you could, and I never once asked whether you wanted it carried.” My voice goes somewhere I don’t recognize.
“You told me not to buy your season. I want you to know that if you’d said take the deal, I’d have taken it.
That’s the entire point. It was yours to say. ”
“That’s the first honest thing you’ve said to me in a month.”
“I’m aware.”
“Keep going.”
“There isn’t any more. I’ve got nothing. No money, no father, no position, no house.” I look up at her. “I’ve got a boat and I’ve got you, and I’ve been lying about the second one for months.”
Reese comes down the last steps and takes my face in both hands.
“Upstairs,” she says.