Chapter 25 Isak
ISAK
At a postgame press conference you are tired down to the marrow, a tired that has nothing to do with sleep, your body is a bruise wearing a suit, and they put you behind a table with a backdrop full of sponsor logos and a room full of people whose job is to find the one question that turns a tired man into a headline.
I had been good at this for three seasons. I gave them the cat. I gave them a bit about Fox. I said "we" instead of "I" and "credit to the line" and "we'll watch the film" and I had never once, not one time, given them the thing they actually came for.
We'd won. I'd thrown for two-eighty. Clover had walked into Gabrielle's office two days before with a spreadsheet that ended Monty Whyte, and the lawyers were moving, and the truth was coming, and I knew all of that sitting behind that table, which is the only reason I can explain what I did, because I'd told myself the danger was over.
Then a guy in the third row, a governance-graphic guy, one of the writers who'd spent a week landing hits on two women and a flattering adjective on me, raised his hand and asked his question.
"Isak, given all the trouble Clover Freeman and Gabrielle Jackson have stirred up around the franchise this season, the distraction of it, do you think the organization needs to make some changes to refocus on football?"
The trouble they'd stirred up.
The distraction of it.
I felt the deflect come up. The cat. The bit. The "I'm just focused on the next game." I felt it come up the way I'd felt it come up on the balcony with Chris, the well-worn exit I'd built into the floor of every hard moment of my life.
I did not let it go past this time.
I leaned into the microphone.
"You want to talk about trouble," I said. "Okay. Let's talk about trouble."
The room changed temperature. They always know. A press room can smell a man going off-script the way a defense smells a checkdown.
"Gabrielle Jackson has given twenty years to this league.
Started in the mailroom of a franchise that wouldn't let her buy a hot dog without ID-ing her, worked every job there is, bought into the worst team in the league on purpose because it was the only one she could afford to fix, and spent two years rebuilding it from the studs while people like the gentleman in the third row wrote columns about whether she was in over her head.
She is not trouble. She is the most qualified person in this building and it isn't close. "
Somebody's pen had stopped moving. I could see it. A pen stops and a press room tilts and you are now throwing into coverage whether you like it or not.
"Clover Freeman has a degree in engineering.
She does. Go look it up before you write your governance graphic.
She turned down rooms that would've been easy for her because she wanted to build a squad of women this league spent a hundred years telling to sit down, and she built it, and four million people watched thirty-one of them turn an organized act of cruelty into the best thing that's happened to this franchise in a decade, and you're calling that trouble.
You're calling that a distraction." I was barreling now.
I could hear myself doing the thing the bible of my own self-restraint forbade, the unfiltered thing, and I could not have stopped if Coach had walked up and put a hand on my chest. "The only trouble around this franchise this season was manufactured.
On purpose. By people who are about to find out exactly how many receipts a community keeps.
And when that comes out, you're going to want to have asked better questions than the one you just asked me. "
I should have stopped there. That was already a grenade. That was already going to be the story for a week.
The guy in the third row, because his job is to find the half-second the lane opens too, asked the follow-up.
"That's a passionate defense of your girlfriend, Isak."
And the lane opened, and I threw the ball straight through my own season.
"She's not my girlfriend," I said.
The room leaned in for the denial, the distancing, the QB stepping back from the conflict of interest, the headline that would've helped Monty more than any photo.
"She's the woman I'm in love with," I said. "There's a difference. A girlfriend is a thing you have. Clover Freeman is a person I'd quit this game for, and I'm in a contract year, so write that down."
There is a specific silence that happens when a starting quarterback says something true at a podium.
I'd never heard it before because I'd never said anything true at a podium.
It is the sound of forty people simultaneously realizing they have the lead of their entire week, and it lasts about one full second, and then it is the loudest a room has ever been.
I stood up. I knocked the chair over. I did not pick it up.
I walked out through a wall of my own name being shouted and I got exactly to the tunnel before my brain caught up to my mouth and informed me, calmly, that I had just confirmed the relationship was real, on camera, in the middle of a conflict-of-interest scandal whose entire premise was that the relationship being real was the problem.
I'd defended her. I'd planted my flag. And in doing it I had handed the scandal the one fact it had been missing, which was a starting quarterback confirming, with his whole chest, into every camera in the league, that yes, it was real, every photo, every implication, all of it, true.
I'd worsened it. I'd worsened it enormously. The governance story had needed me to say that. Tiki's chair-cart photo was now redundant. I'd done her job for her at a podium, for free, because I could not stand to hear a man call the woman I loved trouble for the length of one more sentence.
QB MELTDOWN, the alerts said, before I'd reached the parking lot.
Fox was waiting by my bike. He'd seen it on the locker room TV.
"Well," he said. "That was the most honest thing you've ever done and possibly the dumbest."
"Both can be true."
"Both are extremely true." He clapped me on the shoulder, hard.
"Your family's already on flights. Jules called it.
The whole circus is descending on the Broasis tonight, and not because anybody's mad.
Go home, dummy. You're not alone in this.
You decided to stop being alone in things, remember?
At a podium. On purpose. To four million people. "
They came because it was falling apart, which is the opposite of why they'd come for the Mustangs game, and that's how I learned the difference between the two kinds of full house.
The first kind, two weeks ago, was joy. Catan and wheat-hoarding and Clover forgetting to guard the door.
The second kind, tonight, was a war room that loved me.
Declan reading every alert out loud and getting angrier.
Penelope already drafting a statement for her own platform and Kesley’s because a pop star's reach is a weapon.
Willa and Hayes at the kitchen island building a timeline.
Jules running it all like a field general who happened to be the youngest person there.
My family, the loud beautiful disaster I'd moved five hundred miles to prove I didn't need, packed into a home I'd bought in secret, because the second it looked like the world was coming for me they'd dropped everything and come for me first.
My father found me on the balcony. Late. Quiet. The way he does.
He didn't say anything for a while. We looked at the river.
"I knew about the gaming company," hw said.
"Signed off when you were sixteen. Alexis called and needed a parent on the contracts and you thought having your cousin as your agent she handled it without me, and I let you think that, because you wanted it to be yours so bad I didn't have the heart to be in it.
" He kept looking at the water. "I knew about the motorcycle.
Knew about this building the week you bought it, because I'm your father and I pay attention, and I have been paying attention to you your whole life, son, even when you decided I wasn't."
I couldn't say anything. There wasn't anything in my fast mouth.
"You think you're sneaky," my father said.
"You're not. You're brave in quiet ways, and you've spent twenty-five years building things in the dark because somewhere along the line you decided the only love that's safe is the kind nobody can see to take away.
" He finally looked at me, and the full weight of the attention I'd spent my whole life certain didn't land on me, landed.
"Your mother would be so proud of you. She'd be proud of all of it.
The building and the cat and the boy who couldn't sit at a podium and let somebody call his girl trouble. That last one most of all."
I was not going to cry on a balcony in front of my father.
Okay maybe a couple of tears slid down my face.
I’m not crying. You’re crying.
He let me. He's not a man who fills a silence.
He just put one heavy hand on the back of my neck, the way you'd steady something you built and intend to keep, and we looked at the river, and somewhere behind us my entire family was assembling the weapon that was going to take Monty Whyte apart, and for the first time in my life I was not standing slightly outside the noise.
I was the reason they'd come.
"Tell Clover everything," my father said, into the quiet.
"The building. The fake dating that wasn’t fake for you, the love.
All of it. Before this gets solved, not after.
A man who saves the day and then admits he was keeping a secret the whole time isn't a hero.
He's just a man who got caught at a better moment.
" He squeezed once and let go. "Do it tomorrow. "
"I keep saying tomorrow," I said.
"Then stop saying it," said the man who'd waited twenty-five years for me to be ready to hear that he'd seen me the whole time, "and pick a day, and let it be a real one."
There was no day like today. Carpe the fucking Diem.