Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Max Stevens
She comes to Tuesday's practice with coffee. Two cups. Her oat milk latte, no sugar. And one for me, which she sets on the boards before the session without comment, without looking at me, with the absolute composure of a woman who has made a professional decision about hydration logistics.
It's the wrong order.
She knows my coffee order. She has ordered coffee for pre-session meetings twice before, correctly.
This one has almond milk and one sugar, which is not my order and not her order.
As near as I can tell, a random coffee. I drink it.
All of it. It tastes like nothing I would have chosen.
I drain the cup and set it down and she's watching the drill progression with her iPad and not looking at me, and her left shoulder is completely level, and she is the most aggravating person I have ever stood near.
After practice, in the corridor, she falls into step beside me for four seconds before turning toward the admin wing.
"Wrong order," I say to her back.
She doesn't turn around. "I know."
That's all. She's gone around the corner.
I stand in the corridor with an empty wrong-order coffee cup for approximately ten seconds.
I text Trey about the Bakersfield lineup. I text Fuze nothing because Fuze doesn't need encouragement. I text my sister a picture of Christopher's face from the last visit because it's on my phone and I like looking at it.
I do not text Toni about the coffee.
She texts me at three forty-seven p.m.
Toni: I'm sorry about the coffee.
I stare at it for a moment.
Max: No, you're not.
A pause.
Toni: No, I'm not.
I put the phone down and press the heels of my hands against my eyes, and I am so far gone it's almost funny.
Three days.
That’s how long we have before the world finds out.
I don’t know that yet. Nobody does. Right now it’s Tuesday, the ice is clean, practice wrapped an hour ago, and Antonia Amato is standing at the far end of the parking garage with her phone pressed to her ear and her free hand pressed to her forehead, which means it’s either her supervisor, Damian Price, or her father, and none of those calls end with her looking relaxed.
I should walk to my car. My car is in the other direction.
I walk toward her. She clocks me at ten feet, the way she clocks everything.
She registers, files, continues her call without breaking.
Her eyes track me once and then move away.
Professional. Clean. I stop at the concrete pillar beside her and lean against it and pull out my phone like I have somewhere to be, and I wait.
“Yes,” she says into the phone. “Thursday. I understand.” A pause. “I’ll have the full report by end of day Wednesday.” Another pause, longer. Forced composure strains her features. Her left shoulder is up. “Yes. Thank you.”
She ends the call thinking, phone held beside her.
“Price?” I ask.
“Supervisor.” She slides the phone into her bag. “Quarterly compliance review. Nothing related to—“ she stops. Starts again. “Nothing.”
I look at the concrete above her head. “The report due Wednesday. You need the Boston game stats?”
Her head turns. “You have them?”
“I kept my own log.” I pull it up on my phone and hold it out. “Every read. Every decision point. Formatted the way you do it.”
She takes the phone. Studies the screen. Her expression doesn’t move, but her left shoulder drops half an inch. She scrolls. Stops. “You logged the Rourke reads individually.”
“Four separate incidents. You said track decision trees, not outcomes.”
She scrolls further. The garage is empty around us. Distant traffic, the hum of the ventilation system, the particular compressed silence of a space underground. She hands the phone back. Our fingers don’t touch. We’ve been mindful about that. Four days of careful, and it has cost me every time.
“I can send it to you,” I say.
“Please.” She picks up her bag. She’s about to leave.
I can see the professional re-entry happening in real time, the distance back in place.
“Max.” I look at her. “Thank you,” she says.
Toni says it. Not the compliance officer.
The green eyes are direct and unmanaged for exactly three seconds. “For keeping the log.”
“I kept it before I knew you’d need it.”
She holds my gaze. “I know.” She walks. I watch her go, heels on concrete, the specific rhythm I could pick out of any crowd now without trying.
At the exit ramp, she glances back once.
She probably thinks it’s too far away for me to catch up.
It isn’t. I look back down at my phone. Pull up the log.
Add a note at the bottom in the margin column, where she won’t see it unless she goes looking.
Day four since our deal. Left shoulder down. Progress.
I send her the file and jog up behind her.