Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Grant had never understood the appeal of golf.
Four hours of walking through manicured grass, chasing a ball you'd just hit away from yourself, wearing clothes that made you look like an accountant on vacation.
You couldn't run. You couldn't tackle anyone.
You had to be quiet, which was somehow considered a feature rather than a bug.
The whole sport felt like a punishment designed by someone who found regular punishments too exciting.
But Fairway for Kids raised half a million dollars for Boston Children's Hospital every year, and the team sent a group, and Grant showed up in the male equivalent of stretchy pants and an obnoxiously loud polo because that's what you did when you were the face of a franchise.
You smiled. You signed autographs. You pretended to be fascinated by some hedge fund manager's swing analysis while he shanked balls into the rough and blamed the wind.
There was never any wind. There was never not an excuse.
"You're making that face again," Boozy said as one of the team's blacked-out SUVs pulled into the Brookline Country Club parking lot.
"What face?"
"The one where you look like you're already counting down the hours until you can leave." Boozy cut the engine and checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. "Dude, I'm nervous enough. Don't bring the energy down."
Grant summoned something that felt approximately like a smile. "You'll be fine. Shake hands, make eye contact, don't mention your fantasy league."
"What if someone asks about my fantasy league?"
"They won't."
"But what if—"
"Boozy." Grant clapped him on the shoulder. "You're a professional athlete. These people want to feel important by standing next to you. All you have to do is let them."
The October air hit crisp and sharp, carrying that particular New England smell of dying leaves and money—fresh-cut grass, leather interiors, the faint chlorine drift from a pool no one was using.
Leaves scattered across the cart path in rust and gold, crunching underfoot like they'd been placed there by a set designer with strong opinions about autumn aesthetics.
Grant recognized faces from the charity circuit—tech founders who'd discovered philanthropy around the same time they'd discovered tax attorneys, old money Boston pretending new money Boston didn't exist, the occasional B-list celebrity who'd made the trip up from New York and wanted everyone to know it.
A local news van was parked near the clubhouse entrance, a reporter in a blazer doing a stand-up with the eighteenth hole as backdrop.
Tournament photographers in khaki vests circulated like wildlife documentarians hoping to catch someone important out of their natural habitat.
Near the registration tent, a woman in head-to-toe Lululemon was filming herself with a selfie stick, narrating something about "philanthropy and fairway fashion" to her phone with the dead-eyed conviction of someone who'd said the words link in bio more times than I love you.
He scanned the crowd before he realized he was doing it.
Found her in thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds. In a crowd of hundreds. His brain had apparently developed an Emmy Woodhouse tracking system he hadn't consented to and couldn't uninstall.
For West, he told himself.
She stood near the Elite Connections sponsor tent, talking to a silver-haired man in pastel plaid who was laughing a little too hard at something she'd said.
Working the room the way Emmy always worked rooms—like the room didn't know it was being worked.
She was wearing a navy polo and a white pleated golf skirt that showed off miles of tanned legs, and Grant wasn't the only one who'd noticed.
He could picture her in front of her closet in that pearl-colored silk robe, wine glass in hand, assembling the perfect outfit that said I belong here without trying too hard.
His gaze caught on her feet. The NikeCourts. The ones he'd bought her.
The tension in his shoulders eased.
The silver-haired man was laughing again. Emmy had that effect on people—made them feel like they'd just said the cleverest thing they'd ever said. Completely unaware that Grant was standing fifty yards away, cataloging her mannerisms like a man who needed a more productive hobby.
Grant decided to go to her—surely saying hello to a friend was just the polite thing to do?
—when Tyce Duke materialized at her elbow like a man who'd been waiting in the wings for his cue.
All tousled chestnut hair and deliberate five-o'clock shadow, a cultivated dishevelment that took forty-five minutes and three products.
Probably had a skincare routine with more steps than Grant's playbook.
Emmy's posture shifted. Opened. She laughed at something he said, head tilting back, and the sound carried across the morning air like a personal attack.
The silver-haired donor said something, and Tyce responded without missing a beat—pulled the man into the conversation with one easy gesture, said something that made Emmy cover her mouth.
Grant had watched enough press conferences to know the mechanics of what Tyce was doing: making every person in the circle feel like the most interesting person in the room.
He was good at it. Annoyingly, effortlessly good at it.
"Earth to Knight." Boozy was staring at him. "You good?"
"Fine." Grant pulled his gaze away. "Let's check in."
The front nine started well enough.
"Knight! Hey, Knight!" A guy in salmon shorts and a visor was waving from the adjacent fairway like he was flagging down a rescue helicopter. "Niners are gonna eat you alive Sunday!"
Grant grinned. He loved this part, actually. The trash talk, the easy back-and-forth with people who cared about the game as much as he did. "Their secondary thinks so too. I'm looking forward to discussing it with them."
Salmon-shorts laughed, delighted. "Can I get a picture? My kid's gonna lose his mind."
"Only if you give Ben here your address." Grant nodded at the iPad-carrying team assistant trailing behind him. "So I can send him a jersey when we win."
The guy was already pulling out his phone, and Grant posed with an arm around his shoulder—genuine smile, easy stance.
This was the part of these events he actually enjoyed.
Not the schmoozing with sponsors or the silent auctions where people bid on dinner with him like he was a particularly articulate golden retriever, but this: real fans, real connection, the reminder that what he did on Sundays meant something to people beyond wins and losses.
He was good at this. Always had been.
So he couldn't explain why, when he spotted Emmy and Tyce walking the cart path between holes—her laughing at something he said, his hand on the small of her back steering her toward another cluster of donors—his next drive pulled left into the rough.
Grant stared at where the ball had disappeared. He hadn't missed a fairway by that margin since preseason.
After that, the front nine became a disaster.
Not the weather—the weather was perfect, clear and crisp, the kind of October day that made you understand why people wrote poems about New England.
Not the course — Brookline was immaculately maintained, every green like velvet, every bunker raked by someone who took sand very seriously.
Not even his playing partners, who'd known him long enough to recognize when Grant was somewhere else and had the good sense not to ask where.
Grant was the disaster. Grant, specifically, and no one else.
He could play in front of eighty thousand screaming fans without flinching. He'd made game-winning throws with a dislocated finger, with cracked ribs, with four seconds on the clock and his team's season hanging by a thread.
But Emmy Woodhouse laughed at another man's joke, and suddenly he couldn't hit a fairway to save his life.
He hooked drives. Missed putts he'd normally sink in his sleep. Lost track of whose turn it was because he kept scanning the crowd for a blonde ponytail and finding her, every single time, with Tyce Duke's arm around her shoulders like he'd bought the rights.
"You sure you're okay?" Boozy asked after Grant three-putted for the second time. "You seem... somewhere else."
"I'm here."
"You just missed a four-footer. You never miss four-footers."
"Everyone misses four-footers."
"Not you. Not like that."
On the sixth hole, he spotted them near the clubhouse.
Tyce had upgraded from hand-on-back to full arm-around-shoulders, steering Emmy toward a cluster of people Grant vaguely recognized—hedge fund types, the kind of men who collected athlete friendships the way other people collected wine, purely for the pleasure of dropping them at dinner parties.
Emmy was animated, professional, and Grant watched the men's gazes slide down her legs while Tyce stood there looking pleased with himself—like he'd brought a trophy to show off.
Tyce leaned down to murmur something in her ear. Emmy's laugh carried across the green, bright and surprised, and Grant went still.
His grip on his club tightened until the leather creaked.
"That's West's sister, right?" Boozy had followed his sightline with all the subtlety of a man who'd never successfully lied about anything in his life. "The one you grew up with?"
"Yeah."
"And that's the tennis guy. Duke."
"Yeah."
Boozy processed this. Grant could practically hear the gears turning, which was concerning, because Boozy's gears didn't turn often and never quietly.
"She's pretty," Boozy said finally.
Grant didn't answer.
"West's sister, I mean. Not Duke." Boozy snorted. "Though he's pretty too, I guess. If you're into that whole jawline-and-cheekbones thing. Very symmetrical. Very moisturized."
"Boozy."
"I'm just saying. You've been staring at her for like ten minutes."