Chapter 10
Austin
I was too old to be pretending and Isabelle’s scheme was a little childish, but the numbers didn’t lie. The auction a week ago happened to raise more in one night than we had in two years.
Now was the perfect time to capitalize on it, especially since Jesse wanted to move on the coaching interest sooner rather
than later.
I pushed the button to the elevator.
The pre-war apartment building was beautifully maintained and had a doorman. The crown moldings and antique finishes along
the lobby and hallway were clearly restored with care. Growing up poor, I used to imagine the types of people who lived in
these buildings. Wealthy with easy lives and no concerns.
With each passing floor ding, I found myself wondering more and more about who Isabelle was. How had she become the always-in-control
workaholic surgeon with a vendetta?
I walked past each bronze sconce to the end of the hallway, apartment number forty-eight. I knocked on the door and heard a few steps that stopped. Then started again.
The door swung open.
“Austin.” Isabelle blinked a few times. Her hair was down again, like that night at the auction. The curls bounced around
her shoulders. In a pair of shorts and a loose-fitting T-shirt, she looked approachable, casual.
A rogue jitter threaded between my muscles. She looked . . . different. Beautiful, but in a different way this time. I filed
that thought away with all the others in the “she’s helping you out, so don’t make this any more complicated” part of my brain.
“What are you doing here?”
“You told me to come by to figure out the wedding details,” I reminded her. After the auction, I got a text with bullet points
of what we needed to discuss, an address, and a time. If that wasn’t daunting enough, I still wasn’t exactly sure what level
of “playing pretend” we were doing. “Remember?”
“Oh! Right.” She opened the door wider and let me in. “Sorry, I umm . . .”
“Long night?” I took a few steps inside.
It looked like she was cleaning. Her kitchen had a few full trash bags. Next to them were a couple boxes. A crumpled sweatshirt
sat on top of them.
Another—open—box sat on her couch with a final one on her kitchen counter that overlooked the entire living area. Each box
was partially filled with frames and other random items.
“Something like that.” She turned and went back to throwing things into the open boxes.
“So . . .” I rubbed the back of my neck. I didn’t know what about all of this made me so uneasy. It was simple. “Should we
jump right into your to-do list? We should probably know something about each other if I’m going to pass as your date to a
wedding.”
“Grew up in DC. Sydney-Wells Academy, Columbia undergrad, Harvard Med, ortho residency,” she listed off like I had asked for
her academic résumé. If she was expecting mine, it stopped after “grew up in . . .” I just barely finished high school and
that was only because Theo would have dragged me across the graduation stage if he’d had to.
“I meant, what exactly do you need from me?” I took a few steps closer to the kitchen island, where a couple of small boxes
were lined along the side that overlooked the living area. “I get you want to make your ex jealous, but you don’t really seem
like the type to be bothered going to a wedding alone.”
Even if an ex were there.
She seemed pathologically independent. I assumed she was either seeing someone or didn’t want to be seeing anyone. Beautiful,
successful, and smart; if she was single, it was her choice to be.
“My ex will be there with his fiancée.” She said it casually, but her voice went up an octave. “I felt kind of funny about
showing up solo. It’s an added bonus if I get to watch the skin melt off his face.”
My eyebrows jumped. Skin melting seemed like a lot. I wondered what he’d done to deserve it.
“And I’m how you do that?” I asked skeptically, trying to remember all that she said in the whirlwind of thoughts at the auction.
“Performative modesty isn’t necessary with me.” She rolled her eyes and turned back around and closed the lid on the first
box, now filled. “You know you were a big deal for a long time.”
“I try not to take myself too seriously.” It wasn’t a performance; I just didn’t like to harp on that time. I didn’t want to hang on to my glory days. If anything, I was trying to learn from them. The air in the room was tense, and clearly she’d
had a rough night, so I tried to diffuse it. “So this has nothing to do with your little crush on me?”
“You’re not exactly my type,” she snapped, but the razor-sharp reply came with a light, patronizing smile, cutting away whatever
weighed on her.
“Noted.” I grinned widely; at least it was a little less tense now.
I didn’t know if I should be offended or not, but my heart raced in anticipation of something that I couldn’t figure out.
I glanced into one of the boxes on the island. Was her type scraggly and unremarkable? Because the one thing all the pictures
in the box had in common were one guy.
“And this doesn’t break any rules for your residency?”
“I am not your doctor,” she reminded me again. “I helped Dr. Reinhold out a few times, but I have absolutely no bearing on
your surgery, recovery plan, any of it.” She placed a few more random items into a box. “Not that it matters. We’re not actually
dating, so it’s not like it crosses any lines anyway.”
As she turned around to sort through another stack of items, I picked a picture out of a box absentmindedly.
It was a photo of her with that same guy, his arm slung around her shoulder.
It looked relatively recent, maybe in the last year or so.
They were in the New York harbor. What did he do?
“And you’re not trying to make him jealous so you’ll get back together? ”
An older picture behind that one was just the two of them, each holding out a Harvard pennant from what I assumed was grad
school.
He was smart.
Made sense, someone like Isa probably wanted someone who could keep up with her intellectually. That was probably what her type was.
Now I was a little offended.
She turned around and caught me poking through the box. Lips thinning into a flat line, she gently plucked the picture from
my hand and returned it to the box. “I’ll settle for making it through the week with my pride intact.”
Framed photos, a stuffed giraffe, some cards, all thrown in a box. He meant enough that she was holding on to all of those
things. Till now.
I nodded. “Pretty bold move for him. Showing up with a fiancée, knowing this is your best friend’s wedding.”
“Yeah, well, if he wanted a reaction, I’m not giving him one. All he’ll see is that I’ve moved on, too.” She looked at the
floor for a second before pulling her gaze to mine. “Thank you, by the way.” Her pride competed with sincerity. “For being
a good sport about this.”
“The foundation hasn’t ever been this successful. So, I think we’re even.”
“The foundation.” She took a deep inhale, shut the last box, and released the breath. Taking a final glance, she turned around on her heels and walked further into the apartment and motioned for me to follow. “What’s the story?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, stalling. My hands felt a little clammy. I couldn’t pitch something. And the idea of having to
eloquently tell the smartest person I’d ever met about it felt like more pressure than an important match.
Isa plopped down on the couch. “Well, now you know about my noble quest to make my ex-boyfriend cry.” I chuckled and took
a seat on the ottoman across from her. Her face brightened. “So, what’s the deal with your foundation? I mean, why not run
it full-time, since it seems so important to you?” she thought out loud.
“Coaching was always the plan and there’s interest now; usually these types of things are all about timing.” Coaching felt
like a safe place to go.
And I didn’t know what the requirements were to run a foundation, but I’d been in multiple meetings with the current director
of the Mistry Foundation, who was a recommendation by Theo and Zoya. They all went to the same Ivy League college together.
And it seemed like more than I could do on my own.
“Right.” She fidgeted like she didn’t agree. “I’m only saying, putting yourself up for sale for the sake of a charity seems
like it means a lot to you.”
“The foundation was actually my best friend’s idea,” I explained. Theo had also had the idea for the soccer academy.
“Oh.” She smiled, sitting up straighter. “Joseen’s mom?”
“No, her dad, Theo. We started the foundation while I was still playing in Farnham,” I told her. “Although Zoya sort of became the sister I never wanted when they got married.”
“I know the feeling.” She grinned.
“Theo started it and when he wasn’t able to continue it, I took over. Well, the best I could, anyway. Hopefully, if it can
keep getting this type of funding, it can get a fully outfitted staff,” I clarified. A team that was qualified to run a foundation. “It’s meant to give kids a place to go when they’re not in school. Maybe learn something while they’re
there.”
Like I did when I was a kid. Except that place was usually the alley behind Theo’s parents’ restaurant. It was where I learned
soccer from his grandfather. Where I ate most of my meals, and where Theo taught me how to read because I was the fifth grader
who couldn’t.
“That’s really great, Austin.” The genuinely impressed pitch in her voice made my face heat. A compliment from her felt like
sitting in the sun. And I didn’t know how to react to that.
“Thanks,” I said quickly. I glanced around the coffee table and saw a little black notebook. The nerves funneled into doing
something with my hands. I picked it up and flipped through it. “What’s this?”
“Oh, those are de-identified case logs.” Isa craned her neck forward. “I log every case I’ve ever assisted in into our electronic
medical record, and it spits out a list.”
Each case had a paragraph or so of different notes written next to each one. Each one’s case number was highlighted; it looked
like some organization method.
“What are they for?”
“Pink is reconstructive cases, blue are trauma recon, yellow are athletic injury . . .” She rattled off a few more colors while I noticed there were a lot of yellow ones. “Some fellowship programs require them in their application process.”
“Oh, that fellowship?” I asked mostly to myself.
That book had easily a thousand different surgeries that she’d assisted in or performed. All logged with notes. My brain had
trouble wrapping itself around the idea that someone knew all of this.
“It’s actually not for the Winthrop fellowship.” She took the notebook, closed it, and ran the elastic fastener over the cover.
“Winthrop is a prestigious, robotic-assisted reconstructive surgery training program. This is for Dr. Reinhold. He has a fellowship that spans over a couple years working on athletic injury from pediatrics all the
way up to professional athletes.”
I didn’t know the difference between them, and I didn’t want to sound stupid and ask. But apparently I looked confused, because
she went on.
“The Winthrop fellowship takes all sorts of reconstructive cases: traumatic, athletic, pediatric. Dr. Reinhold’s sports medicine
fellowship is exclusively athletic injury.”
“That’s cool.” There had easily been twice as many yellow highlighted cases in her notebook than any other color. “You gonna
throw your name in the running for the sports medicine one, too?”
She laughed. “It’s not due till after the Winthrop decision is back, so hopefully no.”
I felt marginally disappointed for a reason I couldn’t pinpoint, and my mouth twisted. “You’re not even considering it?”
“Only a handful of people in the world are ever considered for the Winthrop fellowship. The surgeons that come out of that program are the ones innovating the techniques that everyone else uses.” She said it like it was obvious or a forgone conclusion that she had to be one and not the other.
“I’ll deal with a plan B if I have to. But hopefully plan A works out. ”
I was still waiting for an explanation until I realized that was it. “So, it’s for the prestige?”
She pulled a stack of ornately decorated invitations from the pile of mail.
“Is that judgment I hear?” With a teasing tenor, she stood, and I followed suit. “From a man who literally kicks a ball around
a field for applause.” She tilted her head up like she was thinking. When she looked back down, our eyes caught. “That’s a
choice.”
“Technically I kick it around a field for goals.”
She rolled her tongue from inside one cheek to the other but didn’t reply.
I think I won that round. A flutter moved through my chest.
“You know, you can be a little mean,” I said.
“Oh, come on.” She grinned. “You’ve battled through two ACL injuries and months of recovery for each, but a bruised ego’s
too much? Don’t tell me the American Footballer, living legend Austin Cade, can’t handle it.”
Something sparked along my muscles. Her bluntness lit up that competitive fire again—whatever game this was, I wasn’t about
to fold. I smothered a smile.
“Anyway, these are all the events for the wedding festivities.” She handed me the stack of invitations, unable to concede.
They were navy blue with golden calligraphy that looked like it was hand painted.
“We leave in a week. When we land, there’s a welcome dinner, then the Mehndi in Paris, the Sangeet at Versailles.
Then it’s a quick trip to the Vosges mountains for the ceremonies.
A Catholic one for Selena in a castle’s chapel and then a Hindu ceremony in the vineyard. ”
Zoya was right; this was like attending a royal wedding.
I rubbed the back of my neck, wondering what I’d gotten myself into. “Got it.”