Chapter Three
Sloane
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A vanished man leaves a shape.
That's the thing about people who get erased—the eraser is always lazier than the person doing the disappearing wants to believe.
You can scrub a bio off a website. You cannot scrub a man out of a box score from two seasons ago, or out of a team photo somebody's mom posted to Facebook, or out of the institutional memory of a work-study kid who's been in the athletics office long enough to be bored and not long enough to be scared.
I found Dominic Reyes in all three places by Thursday.
The box score came first. I'd started with the obvious thing, the thing nobody bothers to hide because they assume nobody bothers to look: old game stats, archived, public, two seasons back.
A safety named D. Reyes. Second on the depth chart, special teams, a couple of starts when the guy ahead of him went down. Solid numbers. A real player.
Then, week by week, the numbers thin. And then they stop. And a name that used to appear every Saturday just—doesn't.
The Facebook photo came second, three hours and a lot of scrolling later.
A team picture from a spring banquet, somebody's proud mother, forty smiling boys in matching polos—and there in the third row, tagged, grinning, alive, was the face that went with the name the website swore had never existed.
The work-study kid came third, and easiest, because lonely bored people will tell a friendly stranger anything.
I bought him a coffee and asked, all sunshine, whether the media guides ever had errors in them, because I was a stickler.
Forty minutes later he mentioned, unprompted, that "yeah, they pulled a couple guys off the archived rosters last year, which was weird, like Reyes, that safety, he just kind of got memory-holed"—and then he looked briefly like he wished he hadn't, and I changed the subject to parking, and let him forget he'd handed me a body.
By Thursday I had a name, a face, a number, and a hole shaped exactly like a man.
I took it to Mara.
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"Talk me through it again," Mara said. "But slower. And assume I'm the lawyer who's going to ask why we got sued."
Mara Ellison was editor-in-chief of the Ridge Review, twenty-three going on forty-five, with a planner she annotated in four colors and zero interest in my feelings—which was exactly why I'd have walked into traffic for her.
She'd inherited a student paper everyone treated like a hobby and was running it like a newsroom out of sheer spite.
The newsroom was two rooms and a coffee maker that had seen a war.
It ran on her spite the way other places run on funding.
I spread it across her desk.
"Dominic Reyes. Safety. Two seasons ago he's second on the depth chart, plays special teams, gets a couple starts when the guy ahead of him goes down.
Coaches quote him in the spring like he's a future leader.
" I laid down the printout. "Then week six, he's 'day to day' with what the program calls a shoulder.
Week seven, he's off the two-deep. Week eight, his bio's gone from the site.
By spring he's not on the roster, not in the transfer portal, and—" I put down the last page.
"He's not enrolled. I checked the directory.
Dominic Reyes is not a student at Baylor Ridge, and as far as the athletic department is concerned, he was never born. "
Mara looked at it a long moment. She didn't get excited. That was the other thing I loved about her—she treated excitement like a tell.
"Shoulder," she said.
"Shoulder."
"You don't lose a scholarship over a shoulder."
"You don't," I agreed. "Unless the shoulder is a story they'd rather not have walking around campus."
She tapped one green-inked nail on Reyes's smiling face. "What do you actually have, though. What you have, not what you smell. Because what you have is a kid who left school. People leave school. Grades, money, homesickness, a girlfriend in Ohio. You have a hole and a feeling."
"I have a hole, a feeling, and a defensive back who came down a tunnel to tell me there's nothing in the hole."
That got her. Just a flicker. The corner of her mouth. "Lawson talked to you?"
"Lawson threatened me. There's a difference, and the difference is the whole story." I leaned on her desk. "You don't send your scariest guy to stonewall a student reporter over nothing. You send the SID with a smile and a no-comment. You only send the wall when there's something behind the wall."
She sat back. Capped her pen—which meant she was actually thinking, not performing it.
"Here's the rule," she said finally. "And it's the only one that matters, so write it on your hand.
The minute you get a real source—a person, not a document, not a feeling, a human being who could lose something by talking to you—you protect them like your own name's on it.
Because it is. We don't burn people to win.
Voss burns people to win. The day we do it too, we're just a smaller version of him with worse coffee. "
She slid a credential across the desk. "Hawks Club reception's Friday.
Donor money, players doing the meet-and-greet, Voss working the room.
You've got a pass because nobody important wanted it.
Go. Don't dig. Watch. You watch a room like that long enough, you find out who's nervous. And nervous people are a map."
I picked up the credential. "You're letting me run with this."
"I'm letting you walk with this. Slowly. On a leash I'm holding." She fixed me with the look. "I've read your stuff since you were a freshman, Pierce. I know what you can do, and I know what you'll risk to do it, and both of those things scare me a little. So don't make me regret the leash."
I didn't tell her the part I was already getting wrong—the part I wouldn't see clearly until it was much too late. That the rule about protecting your sources gets complicated when one of them starts to feel less like a source and more like a secret you want to keep for entirely the wrong reasons.
That don't-burn-people rule was practically the only thing my mother ever gave me that I kept.
Don't ever let a powerful man teach you that staying quiet is the same as being good.
She'd learned it the hard way, from a man with a corner office who needed her silence more than he'd ever needed her. And she'd handed it to me like a knife, handle-first, and told me to keep it sharp and keep it close and never, ever set it down for a man who smiled at me.
I took the credential. I took the knife with it.
I just didn't notice, yet, that my grip was already loosening.
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"You cannot wear that," Brielle said, when I tried to leave for the reception in a blazer.
She was draped across our couch in a face mask.
She looked up from her phone exactly once and rendered a verdict, the way she did—instantly and without appeal.
Brielle Knox, my roommate. Stylish and loud and emotionally direct in a way that had been alarming me into being a better person for two years.
"It's a press thing," I said. "I'm working."
"It's a rich-people thing, and you're going in there to make rich people forget you can see them—which means you do not dress like a reporter.
You dress like somebody's well-raised niece they can't quite place.
" She got up, peeled the mask half off, and went into my closet without asking, because boundaries were a thing that happened to other people.
"Wear the green. Smile at the men, listen to the women.
The women always know everything and nobody ever asks them.
" She tossed the dress at me. "And Sloane.
The football one. Lawson. Priya at the paper says you two had a whole moment in a tunnel. "
"Priya needs a hobby."
"Priya's copyediting is her hobby. She's just expanded the beat." Brielle leveled a look at me, mask cracking on her cheek. "You've got a thing in your voice when his name comes up. I'm just noting it. For the record. As your friend, and as someone who will absolutely say I told you so."
"There's no thing."
"Mm." She went back to her mask. "Wear the green."
I wore the green.
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The Hawks Club reception was exactly as much money as it sounds like.
They'd done it up in the stadium's club level—the glass-walled one that looks down on the field like a fishbowl looks down on the carpet.
String lights. A bar with a man in a vest. Those little crab cakes that cost a recruiting violation each.
Boosters in blazers the color of money. The players deployed in team polos, scrubbed and smiling, positioned around the room like furniture you were allowed to take a photo with.
I clocked the nervous people, like Mara taught me.
I clocked Voss first, because he wasn't nervous at all—which, in a room like that, is its own data point.
He moved through it like a current. Hand on a shoulder here, a laugh there, the word believe probably tattooed on the inside of his cheek.
Every conversation he entered got brighter; every one he left sagged, the people in it checking to see where he'd gone, wanting him back.
He was very good. I'd underestimated how good. Cruelty you can fight. Charm is harder, because charm makes the room want to protect it.
Then I clocked the man Voss kept orbiting back to. Older. Silver at the temples. A watch you could buy a kidney with. The kind of handsome that's really just expensive.
And because I am bad at being told to only watch, I drifted into his orbit and let him notice me.