Chapter 28
Carter
Jules texts me at seven in the morning, which is how I know it’s a crisis, because nineteen-year-olds do not voluntarily experience seven in the morning.
So I drive over with a bag of groceries and we stand in his sad bachelor kitchen — one pan, a drawer of takeaway menus, a single fork — and I teach him the one recipe my mother made me memorize, the one you can’t ruin.
“Why’s it called that?” He’s watching me crack eggs one-handed like it’s witchcraft.
“Because my abuela called it that. Don’t ask me to translate, you’ll lose respect for it.”
“Is it rude?”
“It’s descriptive.”
“So it’s rude.”
“Turn the pan down, Jules.”
He burns the first batch. Burns the second slightly less.
The third is — and I mean this with my whole heart — edible, and the look on his face when he tastes a thing he made himself is the same look he had coming off the bench for his debut, and I have to turn round and fuss with the pan so I don’t do something embarrassing about it.
“You’re a good cook, Capi.” He sounds genuinely offended by it.
“I’m good at everything, Jules. Keep up.”
“You’re not good at parking.”
“Eat your eggs.”
I don’t tell him the real reason I know this recipe. That I learned it the year after, when feeding myself felt like a thing I was doing for somebody who wasn’t there to see it. That cooking for a person is the most I have ever known how to say I’ve got you out loud.
I wrap the leftovers and label the container so he can’t pretend he doesn’t know what’s in it, and put it in his sad empty fridge next to a single condiment.
“Thursday,” I tell him. “Don’t burn it. Text me how it goes.”
“You want a full report?”
“Color-coded,” I say, and don’t think about where I picked that up, and absolutely think about where I picked that up.
***
Earl isn’t humming.
I’ve been sitting on the folding chair twenty minutes and it’s the loudest silence in the building.
Forty years of that hum. It’s the sound the room is made of. I’ve timed a whole season to it without ever deciding to, and twenty minutes of its absence has me sitting here like a man in a house where a clock he never noticed has stopped.
Earl doesn’t do anything by accident.
He sets down a folded kit, turns, and looks at me with the full weight of his attention, which he spends about as often as a man spends gold.
“Carter.” Not Reinhardt.
“That’s me.”
“You sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“Mm.” He pours the captain’s mug, sets it by my elbow, and lowers himself onto the stool. “Thing about sleeping is, I can tell.”
“Earl—”
“I’m not asking you nothing.” He picks up the next bib. “I’m just not going to hum at you today.”
“Why not?”
“Because the humming’s for when a man needs the room quiet.” He folds. “You don’t need it quiet, son. You’ve had it quiet two years.”
I drink the coffee.
He doesn’t say anything else. He just sits in it with me, and it’s a different quiet from the one I come here for. This one has weight in it. The weight of something that’s done waiting.
I don’t let it out. But for the first time the bag feels too small for it.
***
Mateo catches me after the morning session, jogging in as I’m cooling down.
“You’re ready,” he says in Spanish. No preamble.
“Ready for what?”
He tips his chin toward the far side of the pitch, where I parked Sloane by the equipment shed twenty minutes ago so I’d have somewhere to put my eyes that wasn’t her.
“For that.”
“That’s a woman answering email.”
“That’s a woman answering email at your training ground on a Tuesday.” He picks up a bottle. “You want me to say it plainer?”
“No.”
“Good. I was not going to.” He claps me on the back and leaves the sentence open on purpose, which is his whole method, and which has never once failed to work on me.
I look at the shed for a long time.
Jules jogs past. “Sir—” He catches it, braces for me to rib him. I don’t. He follows my eyeline, and something in his face goes quietly, nineteen-year-oldly wise, and he keeps running and lets me be.
***
Sloane’s finishing a call when I reach her.
I catch the last thirty seconds — her voice in the register she keeps for Marcus, smooth and armored, the correct professional things in the correct professional order — and I don’t need his half to know he’s pressing the same bruise, the one about distance, the one he keeps pressing because pressing it is how he keeps her in the chair.
She hangs up. Pockets the phone.
“You okay?”
She looks at me, and I watch the decision happen behind her eyes — the smooth version or the real one, the same half-second she runs before every answer — except this time I can read which way it tips, because I’ve spent six weeks learning her tells the way she learned mine.
She picks the real one. It visibly costs her. She does it anyway.
“He’s watching everything I do. Every email, every asset, every frame.” She doesn’t look away. “And he isn’t wrong to, Carter. That’s the part you don’t get. He’s doing his job. The surveillance is correct. I’d do the same to me. That’s what makes it impossible.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
It isn’t cruel. That’s the thing that takes the legs out from under me — it isn’t a dig, it’s an actual question, asked plainly, by a woman who needs the answer before she lets herself do anything else.
Do you know what this costs me, specifically, and not you?
Because I’m the golden boy. I get to be charming and reckless and forgiven. She gets to be a cautionary tale. We are not standing on the same ledge and she’s asking, fairly, whether I can see that from where I’m standing.
“Not all of it,” I say, because she’d hear the lie if I said yes. “Not the way you carry it. But I’m learning the shape of it.”
“That’s not enough.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“Okay.” She looks at me for a second. “That was the right answer, for the record. The wrong one was available and you didn’t take it.”
***
I walk her to the rental car.
The notebook’s in my kit bag against my spine, and I’m aware of the weight in a way I haven’t let myself be — not as a thing I carry, but as a thing I could hand over, which is different, which is terrifying.
For two years it was ballast. The thing I hauled from room to room so I’d never float up into the lightness I perform and forget there was anything underneath.
It doesn’t feel like ballast now. It feels like a wrapped thing with her name starting to form on the tag.
At the car she turns, keys in hand, and I make myself say it without making it a joke.
“There’s one more true thing I want to give you. I can’t yet. But I will.” I hold her eye. “I’m not saying that to manage you. I’ve never once said it to anyone. I’m saying it so you know it’s coming.”
She looks at the kit bag. Once. Just once, the place where the weight lives.
Then back up at me, and she doesn’t ask, because she never asks, because the not-asking is the most generous thing anybody has ever done for me.
“I’ll be here,” she says.
She drives away. I stand in the lot with the bag on my shoulder and the weight exact and familiar against my back, closer to opening it than I’ve ever been, and stupid enough to think I have time.
***
My phone goes. Priya. Flagged urgent, which she never does.
Tabloid sent the club a request for comment — they’re asking, on the record, whether your relationship with Sloane is REAL or manufactured for the campaign. We have a four-hour window to respond.
Call me NOW. This is the one we can’t improvise.
Four hours to tell the world, on the record, whether the realest thing in my life is real.
The honest answer ends her career. The lie ends the only true thing I’ve got.
And the clock started before I read the text.