Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Reese
The high off that practice lasts right up until we reach the dock.
Coach Bennett is waiting, which is ordinary. What isn’t ordinary is the grin splitting his face, the one he saves for championship weekends. Coach Wilder stands beside him with her arms crossed and the same look on her.
Behind them are three people I don’t know.
“Beautiful work out there,” Bennett calls as we glide in. “Way enough. Let’s get her up and out.”
We brake the boat down and bring her alongside, and Gray goes out first to steady us before the rest follow in order. I stay in the seat until last, gathering my notebook and the cox box, trying to read the strangers while I do it.
Two men and a woman. The men wear polo shirts with logos I can’t make out at this distance, khakis, the uniform of college athletics. The woman is younger, late twenties, with a press badge on a lanyard and her phone already in her hand.
My stomach tightens.
“Outstanding splits,” Bennett says as we lift the shell clear. “Tyler, what did you clock on that last piece?”
“Three oh four point two for the thousand,” Tyler says, and one of the polo shirts writes something in a pocket notebook.
“That’s nationals-caliber speed.” Bennett is glowing. “Gentlemen, meet Russell Webb from the U.S. Rowing development program and David Okonkwo from the Olympic training center. They’re scouting for the under-23 national team.”
Every man on this dock straightens by half an inch.
This is the thing rowers chase for whole careers. College to the national team, and after that a possibility nobody says out loud. Bo’s easy smile goes serious.
“Impressive session.” Webb puts his hand out to Gray first. “Your rate consistency is exceptional, and the boat speed on that last piece was elite.”
“Thank you, sir.” Gray shakes it with the ease of a man raised to handle exactly this. “The whole crew’s been working.”
“We noticed.” Okonkwo works his way down the line, cataloging each rower. When he gets to me, still in the stern coiling the cox box cable, his face changes. “And you must be the coxswain. Reese Callahan?”
“That’s right.”
“We’ve heard interesting things about you.”
He leaves it there a beat too long. I keep my face where it is and my pulse comes up anyway.
“Good things, I hope.”
“Very good.” He smiles without much of it reaching his eyes. “Your calls from Lake Hartwell have been making the rounds. The way you handled that last five hundred was textbook.” He pauses. “Some people would call it instinctive.”
Instinctive. Like it isn’t training.
“I’ve had good coaching,” I say. “And a good crew.”
“Clearly.” He turns back to Bennett, satisfied with whatever he came for. “We’d like to watch a few more sessions before nationals, if that works. This crew has something.”
“Anytime,” Bennett says. “We’re on the water at four every afternoon.”
While the coaches talk, the woman with the press badge comes down the dock. She’s been hanging back this whole time with her phone lifting every so often.
“Hi there.” She puts her hand out to me and to nobody else, ignoring the eight Alphas in between. “Jenna Kowalski, Southeastern Sports Network. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“About what?”
“Team performance. Your role. Human interest.” Her smile arrives fully assembled. “Female cox on an all-male crew, first in Sable Ridge history. It’s a great angle.”
“I’m not the story. The rowers are the ones doing the work.”
“Modest. I like that.” She’s still smiling, and she hasn’t stopped reading my face since she got here. “Still, it must be a challenge. Being the only woman, managing all those personalities.”
She sets the last word down carefully, the way you’d set down a full glass.
“It’s a team sport,” I say. “We all have jobs.”
“Yours is unusual, though. Commanding eight men. Keeping them together. It takes a particular sort of person to do that well.”
“It takes training.”
Her smile doesn’t move. “I’d love to do a feature on you. The woman behind Sable Ridge’s championship run. The team dynamic, the pressure. The bonds you’ve formed.”
She lands on that one too.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, which is the polite version of no.
“Here’s my card.” She puts it in my hand. “Call me anytime. I think a lot of people would want to hear your story.”
She’s gone before I can answer, already typing into her phone. I look at the card. Jenna Kowalski, Features Reporter. Her email address has investigative in it.
“What was that?” Gray is at my elbow, keeping his voice down.
“She wants to do a feature on me.”
“On you.”
“The female cox angle.” I put the card in my pocket. “Human interest.”
His jaw tightens. “That’s not what she was fishing for.”
“No.” I look up at him, and for a second the distance we’ve kept all week isn’t there. “It wasn’t.”
“Let’s get the boat put away,” Bennett calls, hearing none of it. “Great work today. Rest up. We go again tomorrow.”
We carry the shell in, rinse her down, and rack her in her spot. The scouts have drifted off with Coach Wilder, talking training blocks and race schedules, which is what any crew this fast would attract.
But Okonkwo chose the word instinctive about a woman he’d been told to look at, and Kowalski came here with the word bonds already loaded, and neither of them stumbled onto this dock by accident.
Somebody has been talking.
“Hey.” Bo’s hand lands on my lower back as the others head for the locker rooms. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“You keep using that word.” His voice stays gentle and his eyes don’t. “I’m starting to think you don’t know what it means.”
I want to tell him. The coffee with Quinton, the reporter’s questions, the fact that Harrison’s two weeks started counting down yesterday and nobody but Gray knows it. But the others are twenty feet away and Bennett is still in earshot, and I don’t have a version of it that fits in the time I have.
“Just tired,” I say. “It’s been a long few days.”
“It has.” He doesn’t push. He keeps his hand where it is as we walk. “Come on. I’ll make dinner.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.” He smiles, and my shoulders come down an inch without asking me first. “I want to.”
He’ll cook, and it will be good, and he’ll put a plate in front of me and watch until I’ve eaten some of it. I keep waiting to feel like the reason he does it is me and not the job.
We’re halfway to the lot when my phone buzzes.
Quinton: How was practice? You guys looked fast out there.
I stop walking and read it twice.
You guys looked fast out there.
The lacrosse team runs the trail that loops the lake. I’ve seen them out there, a line of guys in matching shorts grinding up the hills on the far shore, and their conditioning block is in the afternoon. He’d have had a clear view from the ridge for a good ten minutes.
That accounts for all of it, and my skin is still crawling.
“Reese?” Bo is watching me. “What’s wrong?”
I put the phone away without answering the text. “Nothing. My mom.”
That’s the third one today, and I’ve stopped counting how many I’ve told this week.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” I get the smile on. “Let’s go home.”
I make it all the way to Bo’s truck before I look back at the ridge on the far shore, and there’s nothing up there but trees.