Chapter 26 Clover
CLOVER
Isak Kingman told four million people he was in love with me, and I found out from a notification while I was reheating leftover pad thai in my cheerleader-commune kitchen with Maya and Quincy pretending very hard not to watch my face.
I watched the clip eleven times.
I did not cry, because crying was item nine and I'd been telling myself I was nowhere near item nine for two weeks, except I was standing in my kitchen at eleven o'clock holding a fork and shaking, and somewhere around viewing six I'd stopped being able to locate item nine on the list at all, because the list was the problem and I was finally, after thirty years, beginning to suspect it.
I didn't call him. I didn't text him. I drove to Studio Loretta, where the lights were on, because Zahra is always there after hours, and I let myself in with the key she'd handed me like it wasn't a whole thing, and she took one look at me and turned off the music.
"Okay," she said. "Sit on the floor. Floor conversations are the honest kind."
I sat on the floor.
I told her everything.
I had never told anybody everything. That's not a figure of speech. I'm thirty years old and I had never once handed another human being the whole picture, because the whole picture has my soft underside in it, and you don't show people your soft underside, you show them a spreadsheet.
I told her it started fake. The pact, Tiki, the deal we made to look like a couple.
I told her about the helmet and the motorcycle and rule two and the sidewalk where I'd kissed him with no audience and broken my own rule on purpose.
I told her about the chair cart and the photos and Monty's office and the design of the trap.
I told her my dad had gone silent on national television to protect me and I'd had to read a silence to find out he loved me.
I told her Isak had just blown up his own contract year at a podium to call me the woman he loved.
And then I told her what I'd told no one. The thing under the thing.
"I've been waiting for him to leave," I said.
"The whole time. Even now. Even after the podium.
There's a part of me running a countdown, and it's been running since I was nine and got left off a roster for not looking like the others, and it ran when Warner told me I wasn't League WAG material the week I thought he was going to propose, and it's running right now, tonight, while a good man tells four million people he loves me.
The countdown doesn't care what's true. It just counts.
And I built a whole life of rules and lists and not-needing-people so that when the leaving finally comes, I'll have seen it on the schedule.
I'll have planned for it. It won't be able to surprise me into wanting something I can't keep. "
Zahra didn't say anything. She let me hear myself, the way I'd watched her let a dancer hear a wrong count.
"That's a lot," she said finally. "And it's true. And it's still not the part you came here to say."
"That was pretty much the whole—"
"Clover." She said my name the way she calls a correction, no heat, total precision.
"You just told me a beautiful, organized, completely honest list of why you protect yourself.
You ranked your wounds. You're so good at it I almost didn't catch it.
" She leaned forward. "Now tell me the part you haven't told yourself yet. "
I wanted to be honest about what happened in my body when she said that, because it was the realest thing I had.
The list went quiet.
For the first time in twenty years, the thing in my head that ranks threats and finds edges and locates exactly where I was allowed to stand just stopped, mid-count, because Zahra had reached past every item on it and pointed at the empty space underneath, the place I keep nothing because I've never let anything live there.
And what came up out of that empty space was not on any list.
"I love him," I said.
It came out wrong, too loud, cracked down the middle, the genuine feeling breaking through the armor not as a tidy admission but as a mess, the way it always breaks through, at the worst time, in the worst shape.
"I'm not waiting for him to leave because I think he will.
I'm waiting for him to leave because if he doesn't, I have to actually have this.
I have to be a plus-size woman who got the whole fantasy, the quarterback and the family and the home and the love, no qualifier, no 'in spite of,' no asterisk, and I don't—"
My voice went somewhere I'd never let it go in front of another person.
"I don't know how to be a woman who got the thing.
I know how to be the woman who was brave about not getting it.
I've been so brave, Zahra. For so long. About not getting it.
And he's going to make me find out if I'm brave enough to actually get it, and that is so much more terrifying than being left, you have no idea, being left I know how to do, I'm an expert, I could teach a workshop—"
"I know," Zahra said.
"—but being chosen—"
"I know."
I was crying. I'd blown past item nine so far I couldn't see it. I was sitting on the floor of a dance studio crying in front of the first person I'd ever shown the whole picture to, and the world had not ended, the floor had not opened, Zahra had not edged away from how much I was.
She just moved closer and let me be exactly as much as I was.
"There it is," she said softly. "That's the part.
You've spent your whole life being brave about the no.
Nobody ever asked you to be brave about the yes.
" She pushed a box of tissues across the floor with her foot, because of course Zahra has tissues on the floor of her studio, she runs a place where people break open and she planned for it.
"You're allowed to want it, Clover. The whole thing.
No asterisk. That's not greed. That's not too much.
That's just a woman finally standing in the middle of the floor like she owns it instead of hovering at the edge. "
I cried harder, because she'd used the floor line, the one she'd said to me the first day, the one that meant you're allowed to take up the space.
When I could breathe again, Zahra got up, went to her bag, and came back with a manila folder.
"Now," she said, the warmth banking back down into the fair, sharp captain I'd met across a conference table a lifetime ago, "while you were busy being brave about the wrong thing, I got you the last piece."
"The last piece of what?"
"Monty." She handed me the folder. "My sister Naomi's roommate at Cleveland State interns for the PR firm.
The one Monty hired. Naomi didn't go digging.
The kid just complained, the way interns complain, about a gross account where some football executive kept emailing a strategy doc with a woman's name in the subject line, and the strategy doc had a timeline in it. "
She tapped the folder. "He wrote it down, Clover.
The whole thing. The pig delivery date. The comped section.
The plan to weaponize the fan vote. The plan to use the photos.
He put it in an email to a vendor with a calendar attached, because men like Monty have never once been caught, so they stop being careful, because being careful is for people who think they can be seen. "
I opened the folder. It was all there. Dates.
Dollar amounts. His name. The pig invoice cross-referenced to the football operations budget.
A man who'd built his whole life on the certainty that the people around him didn't count had documented his own crime and handed it to an intern he'd never bothered to notice.
"This ends him," I said.
"This ends him." Zahra sat back down on the floor next to me, shoulder to shoulder, two women on the floor of a studio one of their grandmothers had named.
"But here's what I want you to take home tonight, and it's not the folder.
The folder's just paper. You solved Monty with a community you built because you finally let people in.
And you just solved the bigger one, the real one, the one no folder fixes, by saying out loud on this floor that you want the whole fantasy with no asterisk.
" She bumped my shoulder. "Go tell the man at the podium.
Not because he saved you. He didn't. You saved you, twice, tonight.
Go tell him because you finally know the difference between being brave about the no and being brave about the yes, and he's been standing out there in the cold being brave about the yes by himself for weeks, waiting for you to catch up. "
I looked at the folder. I looked at Zahra. I looked at the photos on the wall, the little Black girls mid-leap, the smiling older woman with her arm around a younger Zahra holding a trophy, thirty years of a community somebody built so that nobody would have to be brave about the no alone.
"I have to go find Isak," I said.
"You have to go find Isak."
I got up off the floor. For the first time in my life I got up off a floor that wasn't mine and didn't feel like I was leaving somewhere I'd been allowed to borrow.
I felt like I was going home.
I just didn't know yet that home was a thing he still hadn't told me the truth about, and that the last secret between us was about to come out in the worst possible order, the way the most important things always do.