Chapter 4
Carter
Ideleted it in a car park at eleven o’clock on Friday night and it took me forty minutes to do it.
Forty-one pages. Three years of a woman’s worst year, assembled by somebody who was paid to be thorough, sitting on my phone with a man’s name in the filename and nobody in the world to stop me reading it.
Here’s what I had. I had every good reason.
Friday I was walking into a live-streamed dinner blind.
Priya sent it because she’d decided I couldn’t afford not to know.
And underneath all of that, the honest one, the one I sat with for the last twenty of those forty minutes: I wanted to know.
Not to use. Just to have. To carry around some piece of her nobody had handed me on purpose.
And the whole time, the thing she said on a bench with her voice doing something she hadn’t authorized. If you ever hand a piece of my life to anyone without asking me first.
She’d been talking about giving it away.
She hadn’t thought to cover taking it, because it hadn’t occurred to her that a man would sit in a car park and consider it a kindness to himself.
So I deleted it. Then I deleted it out of the deleted folder, which took another eight minutes and a phone call to my sister, who asked what I was doing and then told me she’d stay on the line while I did it.
I’d like to say I felt good about it. What I actually felt was hungry, in a place I don’t have a word for, and then I drove home.
She comes through the training-ground gate at five to nine, and I put a cone drill into the side netting like I’ve never met a football before.
I’ve been here since quarter to seven. I tape my own ankles at 5:47, I show up early to everything, and none of it’s information I share, because the golden boy is supposed to roll in loose and last. So I am already loose, already warm, already running patterns alone in the dew when the gate buzzes and a woman in a charcoal blazer walks onto my pitch and makes every cone on it pointless.
I have thought about her more than once since the dinner. I am choosing not to count how many times. The counting is her thing; I’ve decided to leave it to the professional.
I drag the next ball out of my feet to bury the evidence of the shank — drop the shoulder, knock it past a fullback who isn’t there, hit the byline I’ve run ten thousand times, in training, in matches, once in a dream so vivid I woke with my calf cramping from a cross I threw in my sleep.
The one I whip in now is clean. It curls away from a keeper who isn’t there and drops onto the penalty spot like it was invited.
Nobody’s watching but her. I tell myself I didn’t do it because she was watching. The lie doesn’t even reach the net.
“You’re early,” I call, jogging over.
“I’m on time. You’re early.” She doesn’t look up from the tablet. “There’s a difference, and you’ve built a personality around hiding it.”
Two-one, and she’s about to make it three.
“Priya wants me to give you the tour.”
“Priya wants a photo of you giving me the tour.” She turns the tablet so I can see the building schematic already open on it, every room labeled, color-coded, a legend in the corner.
“I have the floor plans. I have the media-bay designations. I corrected two of them on the drive in, by the way. Your facility calls Bay 3 the ‘east annex.’ It’s west.”
“It’s been the east annex for thirty years.”
“For thirty years it’s been wrong.” She starts walking like she owns the building, which, for the next two days, the campaign basically does. “Where’s the room with no cameras?”
“There isn’t one.”
“There’s always one.” She glances back. “Every building has the room people go to stop performing. Show me that one and I’ll know where you’ll be when it counts.”
I open my mouth to make it a joke. The joke is right there, loaded, easy. And the thing she just said is so exactly true about me that the joke won’t come out, and I just look at her for a second, which she clocks, files, and walks on from without comment.
There’s a word I’ve started using for her in my own head. I’m not going to say it out loud and I’m not going to examine it. It’s Red — for the badge, I tell myself, the enemy color she wears like armor.
I know it’s not for the badge. I keep walking.
***
The tour she doesn’t need takes forty minutes because she makes me do all of it for the camera and corrects me through every room.
I try to make her laugh. I can’t help it; it’s a reflex with a target now. I tell her the ice-bath room is where careers go to think about their choices.
She writes something on the tablet. I tell her the gym mural was painted by a youth-team kid who’s now in the first team and signs it for fans who don’t know. She writes that down too — not laughing, just harvesting, turning every bit of me into a data point in a column I can’t see.
“You’re not going to give me one,” I say.
“One what?”
“A laugh. A real one. You’re rationing them like there’s a shortage.”
“There’s a shortage.” She doesn’t look up. “And you’re not on the approved-spend list.”
That one I feel in my chest. Three-one. Worth it.
I show her the boot room and tell her it’s where I keep my actual personality. She informs me she’s seen my personality and it’s “load-bearing charm over a structural void,” and writes it down like it’s a measurement.
“You should put that on a plaque,” I say.
“I should bill you for the consult.”
I walk her past the recovery suite, the analysts’ bunker with its wall of screens, the little kitchen where the kit lads keep a kettle older than half the squad.
She corrects my building’s signage twice more.
Then she asks a question about our set-piece routine sharper than anything three journalists managed all season — wants to know why we overload the back post instead of the near — and I answer it properly, and she nods once, and looks faintly annoyed at herself for caring.
I keep that. The way she can’t switch the good brain off even when she’s decided not to be impressed.
“You like this,” I say. “The how-it-works. The systems.”
“I like things that are built correctly.” She glances at a fire door labeled wrong. “Which is why I keep wincing in your building.”
In the corridor outside the physio room I reach into my kit bag for tape and my hand finds a pack of gum instead. Flat-white spearmint. I bought it yesterday, at a gas station, two streets out of my way, and if you asked me why I wouldn’t have an answer that survives daylight.
I put it back. I do not offer it to her. Some things you keep in the bag.
***
We’re halfway down the academy corridor when Jules comes around the corner with a textbook open in both hands and walks directly into the present tense.
“Sir—” He sees me, sees Sloane, sees the small camera crew trailing us, and the textbook goes out of his hands and across the floor in a fan of loose flashcards. “Sorry. Sorry, sir. Ms. Vega. Sorry.”
“You don’t have to—” he starts, and I’m already crouching.
The book’s landed face-up. Intermediate Macroeconomics.
Jules subscribes to newsletters no nineteen-year-old should read for fun and studies on the bus and doesn’t want a single soul in this building to know he’s doing a degree on the side, because the day they find out is the day someone calls him the smart one instead of the player, and I have watched what that does to a kid.
So I put my palm flat over the cover as I lift it, the way you’d cover a card you don’t want the table to see, and I hand it back spine-first.
“Film room’s open,” I tell him. “Go through the back. I’ll square it with the crew.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” He’s gone.
I gather the flashcards, square them, tuck them into my back pocket to give him later, and turn the crew toward the trophy cabinet with some line about heritage. I do not look at Sloane the entire time.
She looks at me. I feel it on the side of my face like sun.
***
“The room with no cameras,” I say, when the crew breaks for a battery swap. “You wanted to see it.”
Earl’s equipment room smells like fresh laundry and forty years of somebody’s quiet. Earl’s at his bench folding the day’s bibs, radio low, and he doesn’t turn around.
“Come in, son,” he says, on reflex, the way he says it to all of us. Then he turns, sees the blazer, the woman who’s decidedly not one of his lads, and recalibrates without a flicker. “Miss.”
“Sloane,” she says.
“Earl.” He goes back to folding. “Mug’s clean if you want coffee. He’ll tell you it’s terrible. He drinks two.”
And she smiles.
It’s fast. It’s gone almost before it lands, controlled the second she feels it happen, packed back down under the professional thing she wears like a second blazer.
But it was real — it reached her eyes, it changed the whole architecture of her face for a moment — and I will be honest, I lose the thread of whatever I was about to say.
I file it. Not in a column. Somewhere I don’t have a name for, next to the gum.
Earl hums, low and steady, and the room goes the way it goes when Earl decides it should, which is make none of us need to be anything. Sloane sets her tablet down on the bench. She doesn’t pick it back up for four whole minutes.
I count those. I’m allowed to count some things.
***
The production team wraps at six. Priya texts a string of fire emojis and the word gold.
The building empties in that end-of-day way, and somehow Sloane and I end up alone in the corridor outside Earl’s room, her tablet between us, going over tomorrow’s call sheet because neither of us has said the thing that would mean leaving.
We’re standing closer than the schedule requires. Our shoulders are touching. Neither of us moves to fix it, and the not-fixing becomes its own loud thing in the quiet hallway.
“You should go home,” she says, not moving. “It’s late.”
“So should you.”
“I’m aware. I built the schedule that says so.” But she doesn’t move toward the door, and neither do I, and the building ticks as it cools around us.
“Do you ever stand in a room you didn’t put on a grid?” I ask. “Just to see what happens?”
“No. That’s how people end up surprised. We covered this.”
“Right. The clause.” Closer now, though I’d swear neither of us stepped. “Spontaneity is how people get hurt.”
“On camera.”
“On camera,” I agree — and there’s no camera anywhere in this corridor, and we both know it, and neither of us says it.
“Eight a.m. is the kit shoot,” she says. “Then the—”
She turns her head to finish the sentence and we’re closer than I understood, close enough that the sentence doesn’t have anywhere to go. Her eyes drop, once, to my mouth, and back up, and she files that too — catches herself doing it, hates it, logs it.
I lean in. One degree.
Less than a step. The kind of lean a person could pretend didn’t happen.
She steps back. One degree. The exact same distance, in the exact opposite direction, a woman restoring a margin she has decided is load-bearing.
“Good night, Reinhardt,” she says.
And she walks the full length of the corridor without looking back — heels even, spine straight, the talking-points card probably already back in her hand — and I stand there with my heart doing something undisciplined against my ribs, watching the enemy’s comms chief leave like she didn’t just take the whole building’s air with her.
Three-one. She’s winning. I have never in my life enjoyed losing this much, and that should scare me more than it does.
***
I’m still standing there when Mateo finds me, kit bag over his shoulder, on his way out.
He stops. He looks down the empty corridor where she went, then back at me, and he reads my face the way he reads a back line — all of it, in one pass, before I’ve decided what it’s doing.
He says it in Spanish, five words, the same five he gave me on the pitch two days ago, except this time he isn’t asking.
“You’re thinking different this week.”
And he’s gone before I can tell him he’s wrong, which is good, because I’m not sure I could.