Chapter 5
Sloane
Iam writing a risk assessment at six in the morning in an Atlanta hotel room when my phone lights up with proof that I have already failed it.
It’s Joss. A screenshot, no message, which from Joss is a scream.
A fan account. Six thousand followers and a username I won’t be repeating to anyone, ever, under oath. The post is a zoomed frame pulled from last night’s behind-the-scenes footage — the corridor outside Earl’s room, the moment I’d convinced myself happened only inside my own head.
Carter, leaning. Me, not leaning away. My face doing something I didn’t authorize, sign off on, or include in any approved deliverable.
Below the image, a hashtag. I close my eyes.
I open them. It’s still there.
I send Joss a single period.
She sends back seventeen cry-laughing emojis and three words.
you leaned too
I didn’t lean. I want that on the record. I am a professional who maintains documented distance, who builds the consent protocols other people forget, who has never once been the story instead of the person managing it.
I zoom in on the frame. My shoulder is angled toward his. The margin between us is gone.
I leaned.
The phone rings in my hand before I’ve decided what to do with the screenshot. Joss.
Of course Joss. She gives me until exactly the second ring.
“Okay,” she says, no hello, “I’m calling as your friend, not as a journalist — you can tell because as a journalist I’d already be asking you for a quote.”
“There’s no story.”
“Sloane. I cover this league. I have a column with my name on it and an editor who’d sell his own mother for the words Sentinels comms chief and Atlanta golden boy in one sentence.
There’s a story. The only question is whether it’s the one they’re selling or the one your face is telling — and your face, babe, is freelancing. ”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. Outside, Atlanta is turning gold and unbearable. “It’s a campaign. I’m running it.”
“You’re in it. There’s a difference, and you taught it to me.
” A pause. — and her voice drops out of the bit, into the register she only uses when she’s actually worried about me, which is rare and lands like a hand on the shoulder.
“Last time a charming athlete got that look out of you, I spent a year gluing you back together over wine I couldn’t afford.
I’m not being a journalist right now. I’m asking you to be careful. Are you?”
“I’m always careful.”
“That’s not a yes.”
“It’s the most yes I have at six in the morning.”
She lets it go, because she’s the only person in my life who knows when to. “Fine. But I’m pre-ordering the wine,” she says, back in the bit, and hangs up before I can tell her there won’t be a need.
I put the phone face-down and go back to the risk assessment, because the assessment is a thing I can control and my own face apparently isn’t.
***
Marcus calls at 7:15. He’s never awake at 7:15 unless something has crossed a threshold I’m about to be told about.
“The numbers are extraordinary,” he says, warm, which is how I know to be afraid. “Engagement’s up four hundred percent. The optics are exactly what the league wanted.”
“The optics are doing their job.”
“Strong optics don’t supersede protocol, Sloane.”
“My protocols are airtight. Everything’s documented.”
“I’m sure they are. You’re the best I’ve got — and I say that without flattery, because flattery wastes both our time.” The warmth again, applied like a clamp. “Which is exactly why I’d be failing you if I let a personnel matter become an institutional one before we’d looked at it ourselves.”
“There’s no matter. There’s a campaign performing above projection.”
“Then the footage will show that, and we’ll both sleep better.”
“I’m sure it is.” A pause shaped like a man choosing a word. “I need to see all joint-appearance footage before it posts. Everything. The raw, not Priya’s cut.”
There it is. The loop, tightening. He has just asked his most careful employee to hand him the receipts on herself, framed as routine, and we both understand it isn’t.
“That’s a lot of footage to route manually,” I say. “It’ll slow the rollout.”
“I have confidence you’ll manage it. You always maintain appropriate professional distance.” He lets the phrase sit, clean and surgical. “That’s why it’s you.”
That’s the first time he’s said it. I write it down, because I write everything down, and because I have a feeling it’s going to be said again.
I count, after I hang up. He said optics four times.
I said professional six. Two adults performing fluency in a language neither of us believes, each waiting for the other to slip into the dialect that gets someone fired.
***
Priya finds me at breakfast, which is its own act of aggression.
She sits without asking, tablet already awake, and slides a pastry toward me like a peace offering with terms attached. “So. The corridor moment is the single highest-performing asset of the entire campaign.”
“It was an accident.”
“It was authentic.” She says the word the way other people say jackpot. “Which is why we lean in. This afternoon. Midtown, a rooftop, full social rollout — the two of you, not at a press event, just out. Falling for each other on camera.”
“A rooftop,” I repeat. “In July. In Atlanta. You want to stage spontaneous romance in ninety-five percent humidity.”
“I want golden hour and a skyline. The humidity photographs as glow.” She swipes to a mood board, because of course there’s a mood board.
“Two drinks, props only — neither of you actually consuming alcohol on camera. I read your clause, Sloane, the whole framework. It’s very good.
Genuinely. I’ve already stolen three things from it.
You’ll thank me. Drinks down, hands close, you laugh at something he says—”
“I don’t laugh at things he says.”
“Then laugh at something you say. I don’t care whose joke it is. The internet can’t hear the audio over its own heartbeat.”
“We’re not falling for each other. We’re fulfilling a contract.”
“Sloane.” She tips her head, fond, patient, a woman explaining color to someone she’s decided is colorblind. “That’s a narrative.”
“It’s a fabrication.”
“In this industry those are the same word.” She bites the pastry. “You know that better than anyone in this room. It’s the whole reason you’re good at the job.”
The terrible thing is that she’s not wrong, and the worse thing is that she knows I know it, and the worst thing is that I built my entire career on the exact blur she’s describing and only started hating it when it stopped being a story I was telling and became one I was in.
“I’ll need approvals,” I say. “On everything.”
“Obviously.” She’s already typing, already three steps down a road I didn’t agree to walk. “I’ll send the run-of-show.”
***
Carter finds me on the perimeter path after, where I’ve gone to walk off a feeling I refuse to name in a building full of cameras.
He’s in training kit, grass on his shins, a water bottle hanging from two fingers. He takes one look at my face — reads it in about a second, the way he reads everything, faster than is comfortable — and he doesn’t say a word.
He doesn’t deploy the grin. He falls into step beside me, half a pace back, leaving me the path.
We walk. Neither of us talks. The morning is already thick with Atlanta heat, the kind that arrives before nine and stays for the summer, and somewhere across the pitches a sprinkler ticks through its rotation, and we just — walk.
It’s the most comfortable silence I’ve had in months, and I recognize that the way you recognize a sound in your house at night: as a problem.
No one’s keeping score this morning. I notice that too.
It should make me nervous, the not-counting. The scoreboard was never really about points; it was a way to keep a man at arm’s length by turning him into a game I could win. You can’t fall for a game.
You just beat it. This morning the game is switched off and there’s only a person beside me on a path, matching my pace without being asked, and that’s a far more dangerous thing to walk next to.
A groundskeeper waves at Carter from a mower three pitches over. Carter lifts the water bottle back, easy, known here, a man on his own soil. He doesn’t make it a thing.
He doesn’t perform the wave for my benefit. He’s just, briefly, the person he’d be if I weren’t here — and I get the strangest urge to see more of that one, the unwatched one, than of the version the league sells by the yard.
I do not log the urge. I refuse it the dignity of a column.
We reach the far gate and turn. Half a lap. He still hasn’t filled the quiet with anything, which no charming man alive is supposed to be able to do, and I am cataloguing the restraint when he finally speaks, low, looking at the path and not at me.
“You don’t have to like the plan to run it.”
I stop walking.
He stops too, a step on, and turns.
“That’s not comfort,” I tell him. “That’s the exact sentence I say to junior staff when I need them to do something they hate.”
“I know.” A silence. “I figured you’d recognize it. Figured it might land better coming from the other side of it for once.”
And that’s the problem with Carter Reinhardt, the whole problem in one sentence on a sprinkler-ticking morning: he handed me my own armor back, polished, and it fit, and for one unguarded second I was grateful to a man whose badge I am contractually required to hate.
I open my mouth to say something professional. I have six versions loaded.
Both our phones go off at the same time.
Priya. To both of us, simultaneously, the digital equivalent of a starting pistol:
Rooftop’s confirmed and on Atlanta’s verified social calendar — going live in 20! Cars are out front. Don’t keep the internet waiting, lovebirds ????
Twenty minutes. On the calendar.
Live. A staged date I never approved, announced to the public before I finished objecting to it, with a car already idling at a curb to take me to it.
Carter reads his screen. Reads mine, upside down, because of course he can. Then he looks at me with something that isn’t quite a smile and isn’t quite an apology.
“For the record,” he says, “I didn’t approve it either.”
I believe him. That’s the part I’ll have to assess later.