Chapter 16 #2
“No,” I say, and the word lands heavy enough to still the room. “You’re speaking about a scapegoat.”
Nolan’s eyes flick, warning. I don’t look away.
“We’re speaking about a partnership,” Marla says, cooler now.
“We need assurance by morning that this will not escalate. If that means a statement, do that. If that means a staffing change, do that. Our board meets at nine.” She lets the time sit like a countdown.
“We love winners. We also love clean lines.”
“Thank you, Marla. We’ll revert by eight,” Nolan says. The line clicks dead.
The room feels smaller after her voice is gone, like we took on water. I rub a hand over my mouth and taste copper. The words they didn’t say echo anyway: make her disappear.
“Resolved,” Nolan repeats, already shifting pieces on an invisible board. He looks at me at last. “You heard the parameters.”
I nod. I know what I’m going to do. The thought lands between us like a dropped puck—heavy and decisive. It isn’t brave. It’s arithmetic.
“If anyone goes, it’s me.” My voice is steady enough to scare me. “Suspend me. Fine me. Issue whatever statement makes your board sleep. But you don’t touch her. You want clean lines? Draw them around me.”
He studies me the way he studies quarterly reports, looking for trend lines, not truths. “Dramatic.”
“Practical.” I push off the chairback and stand still so he sees I mean it. “I’d step off the ice to protect what actually wins you games.”
A beat. Then he leans forward—forearms to knees, the closest I’ve seen him come to human. “You will not resign,” he says, low, like a contract clause. “You will not post. You will not inflame. I will consider your… substitution. Go home. Let me do my job.”
“Do the right one,” I say, already turning. Security opens the door like they were waiting on a signal. The hallway is cooler and louder—the familiar thrum of the building scraping some of the poison off my teeth.
I don’t make it ten steps before my phone vibrates. It’s her name without a picture—I never risked one. I duck into an alcove by a service stairwell where the HVAC drowns the world and answer on the first ring.
“Hey,” I say, softer than anything in that room deserved. “I can fix this. Let me.”
For half a heartbeat there’s only air and the sound of a locker door closing on her end. When she comes in, her voice is thin thread pulled tight. “They moved my interview. Seven a.m. They want the team phone. Device review.”
The phrase lands like a puck to the ribs. “They can’t take your personal.”
“They don’t have to. They can comb the work one and ask me to explain what the gaps mean.”
“Okay. You walk in with counsel.”
“I don’t have counsel.” Scalpel-clean. “I have a temporary badge and a very neat declination form.”
“Then you have mine. I’ll pay. Whatever you need.”
She exhales a laugh with no laugh in it. “You can’t buy me out of this. And you shouldn’t try.” Her paper rustles, the sound she makes when she’s organizing her breath to walk into a room that wants something from her. “Just… keep your head down tonight.”
My phone buzzes—Julia: Distance from staff. Lay low. Smile for cameras. A second text chases it: Statement draft coming. I thumb back one word before I can overthink it: No.
“Jason,” Riley says, hearing the answer I didn’t give her. “Please.”
I lean into the wall until the cold eats some heat out of me. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She doesn’t say goodnight. Neither do I. The line clicks. I’m left with the hum of the stairwell and the ghost of her breath in my ear. I stare at the screen like it might tell me how to keep a promise I just made without breaking something we can’t fix.
I push off the wall, ready to find air that isn’t recycled through a thousand vents. The service stairwell breathes cold on my neck as I take two steps down.
My screen flares to life on its own—a push alert punching through Do Not Disturb like it paid for the privilege.
brEAKING: STAR’S SECRET TRAINER AFFAIR?
Segment goes live in 20 minutes.
Under the headline, a thumbnail blooms: a freeze-frame from last night’s tunnel.
The camera caught the exact second my hand hovered at Riley’s elbow.
Her profile is focused, professional; mine looks like a man about to say something that costs him.
Behind us, the sponsor logo sits dead center, clean and gleeful.
The phone vibrates again—three more alerts stack like penalties: SportsPulse, ArenaWatch, CityNow. Secret romance? Trainer trouble? Is the franchise at risk?
My world narrows to the bright rectangle in my hand. The timer in my head starts counting backward from twenty. I don’t breathe for the first five seconds; when I do, it’s through my teeth.
Julia’s name flashes across the top of the screen, a call this time. I let it roll to voicemail because anything I say right now I’ll have to apologize for later. A text follows: We can still get ahead with a statement. Draft in your inbox.
I swipe it away. Another text—unknown number, probably a burner from a desk producer: Jason, comment? It’ll help shape the story. Attached is a cropped version of the same photo, tighter, meaner. They’ve sharpened the red REC light like it’s blood.
The hallway outside the stairwell thrums—distant laughter, a cart squeaking past, security radios coughing static. None of it touches me. My thumb hovers over Riley’s contact again, then pulls back like I’ve touched a coil on a stove.
Twenty minutes. They’ll turn our silence into confession and our words into kindling. My pulse hammers so hard my jaw pops again and I welcome the pain because it keeps me from moving before I think.
Options array themselves. Kick the door to media and burn it down on live TV. Post a picture of tape and stats and dare them to call competence scandal. Drive to her apartment and put my body between her and the storm I dragged toward us.
My phone buzzes once more—the calendar banner I never look at: Film hit: 19:12… 19:11… Someone coded the countdown into the app like a joke. It isn’t funny.
I thumb open the push alert despite myself. A loading wheel spins, then resolves to a splash page that eats the screen—screaming headline, the thumbnail enlarged, a chyron mock-up below it: SOURCE: TEAM INSIDER.
Team insider lands like a blade slid under the ribs—familiar, precise, meant to make me bleed slow.
I close the browser hard enough to feel it in my wrist and stare at the steel door of the stairwell as if force of will could keep twenty minutes from becoming zero.
“Not today,” I tell the air, and it blooms white in the draft like winter.
The phone vibrates with one more alert. The headline updates, brighter, bolder, promise sharpened to a point.
LIVE IN 19:59