Chapter Seventeen
Sloane
?
I woke up before him, which never happened, and lay there in the gray hotel light doing the thing I do, which is try to figure out the story I'm in.
He was asleep on his stomach with one arm thrown over me and his face turned toward mine, and asleep he looked nineteen, looked like the kid he swore he couldn't find, the careful gone slack off his features.
The bad place on his lower back rose and fell with his breathing, and I thought about the fire-stopper shot he'd taken alone in a bathroom stall to be able to do the thing seventy thousand people had screamed his number about, and I thought, I love you, in the clear unprintable silence of my own head, and I thought, right behind it, the way the second thought always comes for me whether I want it or not:
I have to write this.
Both things were true. That was the whole problem of my life, lying right there in a hotel bed eleven hours from home.
I loved him and I had to write it, and the it I had to write was the machine that was going to grind him up the way it had ground up Reyes and was grinding up Theo, and there was no version where I got to keep both clean.
He'd said it last night. I love you. Wrecked, like a confession, like the realest thing he'd ever risked.
And I hadn't said it back, because the second I said it back it became a sentence, and I am a person who knows exactly what sentences can do, who has spent her whole life learning to handle them like live things.
I got up quietly. I took a shower in a hotel bathroom that smelled like every away game I'd never been on, and I stood under the water longer than I needed to, because I was stalling, because there was a thing on my phone I'd seen at six a.m. that I wasn't ready to make real by saying it to him.
When I came out he was awake, sitting up against the headboard watching me with an expression I'd never seen on him in daylight—soft, unguarded, terrified, hopeful, a man checking whether the thing he'd risked last night was still safe in the morning, whether the sky had fallen while he slept.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey." He swallowed. "You're still here."
"It's my room, weirdo."
He huffed the almost-laugh, and the hope steadied, and God, that was the thing that wrecked me, how easily I could steady him now, how much power I had over a man who'd never once given anyone power over him, and how I was holding, in my bag, on a thumb drive that had come in overnight, the thing that was going to test whether I deserved it.
We had twenty minutes, before. I keep those twenty minutes in a separate place from everything that came after, the way you keep a photograph somewhere the water can't reach.
He ordered room service because he'd never done it—I've stayed in a hundred hotels for football and never once ordered the breakfast, it felt like something you weren't allowed to do—and the wonder on his face when a tray arrived with a domed plate on it, like the world had handed him something just for being alive instead of for being useful, undid me a little.
We ate bad hotel eggs in a bed eleven hours from anyone who knew us.
He told me he'd looked up the word for the color of my eyes the week before and gotten lost in a list of greens and given up and just decided to call it that one, the green he now thought of as a category of one, named after me.
I told him that was the single most romantic and unhinged thing anyone had ever said to me and that I was, regrettably, keeping him.
"You're keeping me," he repeated, like he was checking the math.
"I'm keeping you. It's decided. You ordered me eggs under a dome. There's no take-backs on a man who orders eggs under a dome."
"I didn't know that was a rule."
"It's a new rule. I just made it. I make the rules now, you made one rule the whole time we've known each other and it was a terrible rule, no-contact, what were you thinking, so I'm taking over the rules and the first rule is you're mine and the second rule is you have to let yourself have the eggs.
" I'd said it lightly, the way I say the true things, wrapped in a joke so they can survive the open air, and I'd watched it land on him anyway, the you're mine, watched a man who'd been told his whole life he was a commodity hear a girl in a hotel bed inform him he was, instead, kept—chosen, wanted, not for the hit or the number but for the way he looked at a domed plate—and I'd thought, with the thumb drive screaming in my bag the whole time: whatever's on that drive, whatever it costs, I had this.
We had eggs under a dome. They can't take the eggs.
That's the thing I've held onto, through all of it, through the worst of what came next. They took a lot. But they were never in that room. The eggs were ours.
Then I'd gone to shower, and stalled, and come back out, and now he was watching me with that unguarded morning hope, and I had to decide whether to hand him the grenade in my bag or let us have ten more minutes of being people who'd ordered breakfast.
Because the story had broken open while we slept.
?
The email had come in at 3 a.m., to the Review tip line, from an address that was a wall of random letters and would lead nowhere.
No words in the body. Just an attachment, which I'd opened on my phone in the bathroom with the fan running so the sound wouldn't wake him, and which had made me sit down hard on the edge of the tub.
It was Theo's medical file. Or a piece of it.
An internal injury-status report, the kind that's supposed to be sealed, with the team letterhead at the top and a date from three weeks ago and a diagnosis in clinical language that I'd had to look up but that I now understood meant: a stress reaction in the tibia, trending toward fracture.
Recommend immediate cessation of activity.
Re-evaluate in two weeks. No contact, no impact. Signed by a staff physician.
And clipped behind it, a second document. A revised report. Same date. Same player. The diagnosis downgraded to lower-leg soreness, limited participation, cleared for non-contact and game-day evaluation. The cessation language gone. The fracture word gone. A different signature.
They'd written the truth and then they'd rewritten it. One file said stop or this leg breaks. The other said he's fine, run him. Same kid. Same day. Three weeks ago.
And behind both, the thing that turned my stomach to water: a calendar invite.
From D. Mercer. To Theo's school email. Subject line blank.
Location: a room number in the football operations building—the one with the door that's always closed, the one Reyes had described, the one where they make you grateful for the knife. Date: two days out.
They were going to Reyes him.
That's what I was looking at, sitting on the edge of a hotel tub with the fan running.
Documented, sourced, real proof—the holy grail Mara had been demanding, the difference between a feeling and a story—and a clock.
In two days they were going to walk Theo Brooks into a closed room and make him sign his disappearance, and I had the proof in my hand, and I was lying in a bed with the one person on earth who loved Theo more than I did.
I'd printed nothing. I'd told no one. I'd come out of the bathroom and put on the hoodie and steadied the love of my life with a joke, and the whole time the thumb drive in my bag had been screaming.
I told him because I had to. Because not telling him—managing his fear, deciding for him what he was allowed to know—would have made me the exact thing I'd told him in the truck not to be.
"Cade." I sat on the edge of the bed. "I got something last night. About Theo. Real proof. The kind that ends this."
I watched the soft go out of his face, watched the morning-after boy disappear and the wall start, brick by brick, and I hated it, I hated that I was the one laying the first brick, but there was no other way to hold the truth in a room with him.
I showed him. The real report. The rewrite. The calendar invite with Mercer's name and the blank subject line and the closed door, two days out.
He went so still I could hear the heater cycle on.
"Two days," he said finally. Barely a sound.
"They scheduled it for two days from now.
They're going to—" His jaw worked. "They're going to do to Theo what they did to Dom.
There's a date on it. There's a calendar invite.
I've known the shape of this for years and told myself loyalty meant keeping quiet, and now there's a date on my best friend's disappearance and it's in two days and I—" He stopped.
"And the worst part is they don't even know they're cruel.
To them it's a Tuesday. It's a logistics item.
Mercer scheduled it between a flight and a booster lunch. "
"I can run it." My voice came out level, the work voice, the one Brielle teases me about, because it was the only voice that wouldn't shake.
"Today. I have everything I need now—the real report, the rewrite, the meeting.
I run this and they can't have that meeting, because the second it's public, touching Theo looks like exactly what it is. The story saves him."
"No." Fast. Hard. "No—Sloane—not yet."
And there it was.
The word the whole machine runs on. Not yet. The most reasonable word in the world. Be patient. Be careful. Trust me. Not yet. Reyes had heard it. Theo had heard it. My mother had heard it from a man in a corner office who needed her silence and called it timing.
I felt myself go cold and bright and far away, the place I go.
"Say that again," I said quietly. "Say not yet to me again, Cade, and really listen to who you sound like."
He flinched like I'd hit him. To his credit—and I'd hold onto this later, when I was deciding whether to forgive him, when I was deciding whether I'd been a fool—he heard it. I watched him hear it.
"I know how that sounds," he said, low. "I know exactly how it sounds, and I'm asking anyway, and I need you to hear why before you decide I'm Voss.
" He took my hands. His were shaking, which his never did.
"If you run it today, Theo finds out he's in a newspaper before he finds out from anyone who loves him.
He's a victim in your story. The hurt kid they ran into the ground.
And he will hate it, Sloane—you don't know him, he would rather break than be pitied, he told you himself, he's tired of people deciding what's good for him by deciding what he gets to say.
If you run it without him, you save his leg and you take the last thing he's got, which is the choice.
" His grip tightened. "Give me one day. One.
Let me get to him first. Let me tell him I broke, let me tell him about us, let me put the proof in his hands and let him decide whether he wants to be the kid it happened to or the man who blew it open.
If he says run it, you run it, names and all, mine included, I'll go on the record next to him.
But let him be a person in this. Not a document. Please. One day."
I sat there with his shaking hands around mine and the thumb drive screaming in my bag and the clock ticking and the love of my life asking me to wait—and for the first time I couldn't tell, I genuinely could not tell, whether I was looking at the wall or the man.
Whether one day was protection or the oldest trick in the building, the one I'd built a whole investigation around exposing.
"One day," I said. "Cade. If you're wrong—if they move it up, if they get to him first, if this is the wall talking and I just handed Theo to them to keep you—I will never forgive either of us.
You understand that. There's a version of this where waiting one day costs Theo everything, and we'll have done it for love, and love won't be an excuse. It'll just be the reason."
"It's not the wall." His eyes were wet and open and pleading.
"I swear to you. It's the one thing I actually learned from you.
That not talking about it isn't protecting somebody—it's protecting whoever did it to them.
So I'm going to go talk. Today. I'm going to do the bravest thing I know how to do, which is hand my brother the truth and let him choose, and I learned it from a girl with a recorder who would not let me lie to myself. "
I gave him the day.
I want it on the record that I gave him the day with my eyes open, knowing what waiting costs, choosing him and Theo both over the cleaner, safer version of myself.
It was the right call. I still believe that, even now, even knowing how it ended.
It was also the first time I let love move my deadline, and the next time I did it, it nearly cost me everything.
But that morning, in the gray light, I closed the laptop and I cupped his terrified face in my hands and I said, "Go be brave, then. I'll hold it twenty-four hours. Not one minute more, Cade. At hour twenty-five, with or without you, with or without Theo, it runs."
He kissed me like I'd handed him a country.
Then his phone rang on the nightstand. Not Voss's tone. A different one. One I'd never heard, and watched drain every bit of color out of him as he looked at it.
"It's my dad," he said.
?