Chapter 28
CLOVER
There's a kind of morning where you wake up already wearing the day like armor that finally fits, and I had one, in a bed that wasn't mine, in a building I'd just learned belonged to the man whose arm was across me, and the first item on my list when I opened my eyes was not a threat.
It was a meeting. Ten a.m. Gabrielle's office. I had the folder.
I'd dressed for it like I dress for the things that matter, which is to say I'd put on the blazer that meant business and makes me feel like I've never once apologized for taking a chair, and Isak watched me button it from the bed with an expression I'd have to deal with later, and I'd told him to stay home, and he'd said no, and I'd said this part is mine, and he'd said okay, that one's yours, I'll be loud somewhere else, and let me go do it.
So I walked into Gabrielle Jackson's office alone, with the receipts, on purpose.
Except it wasn't Gabrielle's office anymore by the time I got there. It was a war room.
Gabi was at the head of the table in a suit the color of a closing argument. Coach Roper sat to her right with a legal pad, still, the way he goes still in a film room, watching and watching until the pattern shows itself.
Jules Kingman had three devices open and a timeline taped to the glass wall, because Jules does not believe in a problem she can't make into a flowchart. I wasn’t even sure how she’d gotten here. But I would admit, the girl had some serious spycraft, and she’d be running the world someday.
Zahra stood by the window with the manila folder's twin. She gave me a contained smile and a little salute. Seemed I’d finally passed her tests.
And Fox was there, which surprised me, in a suit, looking more like a movie star than a football player. Interesting. What role was he playing today, and did it have anything to do with Jules?
And my mother was there.
My mother. Tory Freeman. In her good coat, in a Tigers franchise conference room, with her hands folded on the table and her chin up, the former cheerleader turned badass lawyer who'd been told at twenty-two to take up two chairs, taking up two chairs.
"Mom."
"Gabrielle called me," my mother said. "Somebody on this side of it needed to be a parent and somebody needed to know the law. So I came.”
She reached into her bag. “Oh and I brought the photo from the shoot, the one with April, the press never had it. Turns out a forty-year-old photograph of two cheerleaders in a green room is worth something to me.” She slid it across the table without ceremony.
"I take up space now. Somebody told me to once. "
I did not cry in a war room. I added it to the list of things I'd cry about later, which was getting to be a long and beautiful list.
"Sit down, Clover," Gabi said. "We've got eleven minutes before Monty gets here. He thinks he's coming to a disciplinary meeting about you."
"He's not?"
Gabi smiled, and it was not a warm smile. She'd started in a mailroom that wouldn't let her buy a hot dog without ID. She'd bought the worst team in the league on purpose because it was the only one she could afford to fix. She remembered every minute of it, and the smile said so.
"He's coming to his," she said.
Monty Whyte walked in at ten exactly, because men like Monty are punctual to the meetings they think they've already won.
He had a leather folio and a tablet and he sat down without being asked, comfortable, the most comfortable person in the room the way he'd been the most comfortable person in every room for thirty years, never once having to wonder whether he belonged in it.
He clocked the table. He clocked the numbers at it.
I watched him decide it was a show of force on Gabi's part, a lot of women and a wide receiver assembled to make a point, and I watched him set it aside as a thing that would not matter in an hour, because the one trick Monty Whyte had never learned in his whole life was counting the people he'd decided didn't count.
"Gabrielle," he said. "Quite a crowd. I'd assumed this was a private personnel matter.
" His eyes went around the table and landed on me, and softened into something worse than contempt, which was pity.
"Ms. Freeman. I want you to know none of this is personal.
You were put in an impossible position. A conflict of interest this size, the optics, the relationship with the quarterback—"
"Sit down, Montgomery," Gabi said.
He sat, because he thought sitting cost him nothing.
"You hired a public relations firm in June," Gabi said. "Crestline Strategic. Retained quietly, paid through a discretionary line in football operations that routes around my desk. Do you want to tell the room what you hired them for, or should I?"
A flicker. Small. The first one.
"Crisis management," Monty said smoothly. "Which, given the season start we've had, was prudent. The board will agree it was prudent."
"They seeded the governance angle to four beat writers," Jules said, not looking up from her devices, reading it off like a grocery list. "I have the email chain.
The kid who interns there has a conscience and a roommate.
The strategy doc went out August ninth. It has a timeline in it.
You wrote a timeline, Mr. Whyte. You're the only person in this scandal organized enough to leave a paper trail, and you used it on yourself. "
"I don't know who that young woman is or what she thinks she—"
"The pigs," Zahra said.
The room went still in the way a room goes still when the real deal arrives.
"Excuse me?"
"The rubber pigs." Zahra crossed to the glass wall and tapped the timeline.
"Thrown at my squad on debut day. Branded novelty pigs, a full case, delivered to the loading dock the morning of the game.
Signed for." She set a printout on the table in front of him, slow, the way she sets a correction in front of a dancer who already knows the count was wrong.
"Dock receipt. Vendor invoice. The vendor's a shell.
The shell traces to a second shell. The second shell bills against the football operations budget.
Your budget, Monty. You didn't just spin the insult after it happened. You catered it."
"You ordered the pigs," I said.
I hadn't planned to say it. It came up out of me, out of the place under the list, and it came out quiet, which is how I sound when I mean it most.
"You looked at thirty-one women I built a squad out of, women this league spent a hundred years telling to sit down, and you spent franchise money to have rubber pigs thrown at them on the one day they got to stand up.
And then you called it organic. You called us the distraction.
You wrote a timeline about how to make a room full of grandmothers and dancers look like a scandal, and you expensed the pigs to do it, because it never once occurred to you that the loading dock has a camera or that the woman whose mom works event staff would take a picture or that any of us were people who could see you. "
Monty's mouth was a flat line now. The ease was gone. What replaced it was the thing I'd been waiting a whole season to watch arrive on his face, the dawning, the realization landing on him in real time that he had been visible the entire time to exactly the people he'd never bothered to look at.
"This is circumstantial," he said. "Shells. An intern. A photograph of a loading dock. You don't have—"
"The café," Fox said.
Everyone looked at him. Fox Daws straightened his responsible suit.
"There's a café on the corner by the practice facility," Fox said.
"Pour Decisions. The owner's named Dave.
Great guy, terrible at naming things, worse than me, and I named a penthouse the Broasis.
Dave notices who pays, because that's his whole job, and he watched a man in a team lanyard buy coffee three separate times for a woman in pink leather, and one of them always put it on a corporate card, and Dave kept the receipts because he’s a small business owner in this economy and he does not play about a chargeback. "
Fox slid his phone across. "That's you, Monty. And that's Tiki Jackson. Three meetings. Two weeks. Corporate card. You want to tell the room you were discussing the weather, or should we let Tiki tell it, since she just walked in?"
Because Tiki had just walked in.
She'd come for the meeting she also thought she was winning, in pink leather, dressed like a woman expecting a coronation.
She got two steps into the room before she read it.
Tiki Jackson is many things, most of them exhausting, but she is her sister's sister, and she could read a room that had already turned.
"Gabrielle," Tiki said. "What is this."
"This is the part," Gabi said, "where I find out whether my sister conspired with my VP of football operations to manufacture a scandal against two women and a cheer squad in order to damage the franchise's valuation, force a distressed sale, and leverage your ownership stake.
Sit down, Tiki. We're almost to your part. "
I watched it happen on Tiki's face, the calculation, the same calculation Monty had run and lost, the fast backstage hunt for the exit that cost her the least. She found it fast. That's the thing about Tiki I'd underestimated all season.
She's not stupid. She's just only ever been loyal to whichever version of the story keeps her central.
"I didn't manufacture anything," Tiki said, and turned, smooth as anything, on the man she'd had coffee with three times.
"Monty came to me. He had concerns about the direction.
About the optics. I'm an owner, I have a fiduciary duty to listen to concerns, and if he took my listening and turned it into—" she gestured at the table, the folders, the photo of two young cheerleaders in a green room, "—whatever this is, then he misrepresented our conversations, and I'll be telling the board exactly that. "