Chapter 34
Carter
Mateo finds me in the players’ lounge and tells me, in Spanish, low, that the campaign is running a slide about me and Sloane that I have never been shown.
“What slide.”
“Authenticity Leverage.” He says the English words like they taste wrong. “It went round a staff channel this morning. There are — observations. About how the two of you’re when no one is filming.” He watches me. “I thought you should hear it from me.”
I’m already moving.
***
Priya’s in the media suite and she lights up when I come in, because she genuinely thinks she’s about to give me good news.
“You saw the strategy! Isn’t it—” she presses a hand to her chest “—Carter, it’s the most beautiful pivot we could have hoped for. We stop manufacturing the story. You two are actually in love. The campaign just gets to tell the truth now. Do you know how rare that’s?”
“You documented us.”
“We observed engagement signals, which is standard—”
“Who gave you the observations.” I’m not smiling. I can feel that I’m not smiling, and I can feel her notice the missing thing where the easy thing always is. “The off-camera stuff. The way we’re when we think it’s just us. Who fed you that?”
“It came through the partnership.” She says it lightly, a logistics detail, no idea she’s handing me a knife. “Both sides report up. Sloane’s documentation is meticulous — honestly, it’s the best-sourced material we have.”
Sloane’s records. The clean ones she keeps because keeping them is the only armor she trusts. She built them to protect herself, and they’re being read up a chain I swore to her didn’t exist.
“Do you understand what that slide does to her,” I say. “She’s head of comms for the rival club. Best-sourced material means her own files prove she fell for the opposition. You’re not putting her in a love story. You’re handing her boss a reason to end her.”
“That’s—” the first flicker, her certainty catching on something “—that’s a personnel matter on their side. Our job is the rollout.”
“Your job built the gun. You’re proud of the receipt.”
“Carter.” And she’s hurt — the specific wounded confusion of a person who has only ever believed she was helping. “Nobody is getting hurt. You’re in love. I’m giving the whole country the best story of the summer. Why does everyone keep looking at me like I did something wrong?”
There’s no answer that lands, because she isn’t lying and she isn’t cruel. She’s a believer, and you cannot argue a believer back out of the church. She built a cathedral out of the realest thing in my life and she’s genuinely wounded that I won’t come kneel in it.
And the worst of it — the part I’ll keep turning over later, when there’s room to think — is that she isn’t entirely wrong. We are in love.
That part is true. She just can’t see that you can build a true thing and a weapon out of the exact same material, and that the only difference between them is who ends up holding it and what it costs the person standing on the other end.
I was the one who said the real thing was safe. I’m the reason she stopped guarding it.
***
I call her. It rings out. I text.
Nothing. I call again — and then I remember the calendar invite that lit up both our screens last night: the Final Phase call, both our names at the top of the attendee list, nine o’clock this morning.
She’s in the room right now. She’s watching that slide land with Marcus three seats away, and I’m eight states south with a phone that won’t connect and nothing under my hands to do about it.
I know exactly how it’s going for her, because I’ve watched her work a hostile room.
She’ll have read the slide title before Marcus did — Authenticity Leverage — and understood the whole shape of it in a heartbeat: that her own clean files are the knife, that her own competence is the fingerprints on the handle. She won’t flinch.
That’s the part that guts me. She’ll sit there with her face doing the composed thing and take it like weather, because flinching is a tell and she doesn’t give tells, and she’ll be more alone in that glass conference room than I have ever been anywhere in my life.
And I did that. I built her a safe place to set the thing down, and then I left the door open behind us.
I stand in the hallway with no idea what to do with them anyway, and that’s when I understand how much of my life is a performance, because the performance is gone and there’s nothing under it that knows how to fix this. No grin to deploy. No bit.
No audience to win. Just a man who broke something and can’t charm it back together.
I go to Earl.
He looks up. He takes one look at my face and he stops humming, and the room goes quiet in the specific way it only goes when Earl decides it should.
“I think I’ve gotten her fired,” I say. The words come out flat, no shape to them.
“I think I did the thing I always do. I made it fun and I made it easy and I never once did the math on what fun-and-easy costs the person who isn’t allowed to be the fun one.
I get to be the bright one because somebody else is carrying the—”
I stop.
It’s right there. The whole of it, the reason I learned to be light, the brother who used to carry the heavy end so I never had to and then wasn’t there to carry it anymore and so I just decided no one would ever have to feel a heavy thing near me again — it’s right at the back of my teeth and Earl has gone still and is letting me get there in my own time.
I don’t get there. I’m not built to get there yet.
My jaw aches. I’ve been clenching it without knowing. Two years of architecture in my face, holding up a wall I told myself was to keep everyone else safe from the heavy thing — and which mostly, it turns out, just kept me from ever setting it down.
“I’m carrying something,” I say instead, which is the closest I’ve come, “and I made her carry the weight of me without ever telling her there was any.”
Earl nods, slow, and doesn’t push, and pours the coffee into the captain’s mug.
***
Mateo’s in the doorway. I don’t know how long he’s been there.
He doesn’t tell me it’ll be fine. He doesn’t tell me to fix it. He says one thing, quiet, in English so there’s no mistaking it:
“So go and tell her the thing you have never told anyone.”
Then he’s gone, and Earl’s humming hasn’t come back, and I’m sitting on an overturned crate with a mug going cold in my hands, looking at the kit bag on the floor by the bench — at the battered corner of a notebook I have carried, unopened, into every room of my life for two years.
The one true thing I promised her, in a parking lot, when I still thought I had time.