Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Beckett
Kowalski takes three days to run it. She spends them pulling the state filing and calling the firm for comment. I know about the second part since the firm rings the house twice looking for Reese and gets Bo both times.
I set an alarm for five so I can read it before anybody else does.
Kowalski’s piece goes up at 6:02. I’m on the porch with the laptop on my knees and the lake doing nothing in particular out past the trees, and I read the whole thing twice before I let myself have an opinion about it.
It’s good, which is the problem.
She got the filing date off the state registry, so the second paragraph has James Callahan’s name, his firm, and the words amended designation sitting in a row where anybody can find them.
She quotes Reese six times, every one something Reese chose to say.
There’s a line near the bottom about a men’s roster, a registered Omega, and three sets of rules that don’t agree with each other.
It’s written to be read by the people who wrote them.
There is exactly one sentence about the crew.
Callahan declined to discuss her teammates’ private lives, and this outlet found no source willing to do it for her.
I read that one three times before I close the laptop and go make breakfast for nine people, since it gives my hands a job.
Zane comes down first. He always does.
“Is it out?”
“Since two minutes past six.”
“Is it bad?”
“It’s fair.” I watch him work out that those aren’t the same thing. “Eat something before you look at it.”
He eats standing up, scrolling with his thumb. About forty seconds in, he stops chewing and puts the phone down on the counter screen-side up.
“Her dad’s firm has a website. There’s a picture of him on it.”
“I know.”
“She’s got his chin.”
“Zane.”
“Sorry.” He takes the pan off the stove and starts scrubbing it. “I’m fine. What do you need?”
That’s the whole crew in one exchange, if you want it. Ask any of them how they feel and they’ll tell you what they can do about it.
By seven I’ve got a plan. Tyler gets the comment sections, since he’ll read them clinically and won’t repeat the worst ones to anybody.
Eli gets the group chats, since that’s where the rowing world actually lives.
Bo takes the phone, on the theory that anyone who calls the house today should have to talk to the largest man in North Carolina.
Jackson gets nothing, on the theory that Jackson today is a liability and everybody in this kitchen knows it, including Jackson.
Cameron takes the driveway. He doesn’t say a word about it. He just picks up his keys, goes outside, and sits on his bike at the end of the gravel where anybody turning in has to look at him first.
Gray comes down at seven-fifteen in a shirt with a collar, which he hasn’t worn since the hearing.
“Where’s Reese?”
“Still asleep. I checked twice.”
“Let her sleep.” He pours coffee he isn’t going to drink. “Athletics rescheduled the roster shoot.”
Zane looks up. “To when?”
“Two o’clock. Today.”
“That’s deliberate.”
“Everything is,” Gray says.
He’s not wrong, but he’s got the reason backwards, and it takes me until noon to work out why.
Campus is the part I’m actually good at.
I go to my ten o’clock, sit where I always sit, and answer a question in seminar about supply elasticity that I could have answered in my sleep.
I do it in the same tone I’d use any other week, since the whole trick is refusing to behave like a person under discussion.
Five people ask me about the article before lunch. I give every one of them the same seventeen words: She said what she wanted to say, it’s in the piece, and we race in four days. Then I ask them a question about themselves, which nobody expects and everybody accepts.
Two guys from the lacrosse house look at me across the dining hall and don’t come over. That’s Quinton’s doing, and I file it.
A woman from the women’s eight stops me outside the library. I brace for it.
“Tell her Adams is done. Not just suspended. The whole boat’s glad.” She adjusts her bag. “That’s all. Don’t make it a thing.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“You’re doing it right now. You’ve got your face on.”
I get to the boathouse at one-thirty, and my face stays exactly where it is.
The sports information office has sent a woman named Vance and a photographer who looks about our age. They’ve got the racks lit and a reflector propped against a hull, and Bennett’s standing at the edge of the bay with his clipboard in his hands.
Reese comes in at one forty-five with her hair down.
She’s in the black quarter-zip the rest of us are wearing, open at the neck, and nothing on earth is going to make the hollow of her throat other than what it is.
Gray’s mark is four days old. It’s darkened to the color of an old bruise, and it’s the first thing anybody sees.
Bo positions himself at her shoulder without appearing to move. Tyler takes his glasses off, cleans them, and puts them back on.
Vance sees it about nine seconds in.
“Ms. Callahan.” She’s pleasant. Genuinely pleasant, which somehow makes it worse. “Would you be more comfortable in something with a higher neck? I’ve got a team jacket in the car.”
“I’m fine in this.”
“These go out on the AVNC media wire. They’ll be on a dozen sites by the weekend.” Vance keeps her voice down. It’s a courtesy, and she’s still saying it in a boat bay with nine other people in it. “I’m thinking about the comments under them.”
“So am I.”
“Then let me put you in the back row. You’re a hundred and twenty-five pounds, nobody expects you front and center, and it solves it.”
There it is.
I’ve spent my entire life being the person who makes the awkward moment go away.
It’s the only thing I’ve ever been reliably good at, and I could do it right now.
I could laugh and say something about nobody putting the cox in the back unless they want her steering the photo.
Vance would laugh, Reese would end up in the back row, and everybody in the bay would get to feel better about it.
Every man in here is waiting for one of us to speak. Gray hasn’t moved or blinked. Jackson has gone very still against the far rack, and if Jackson speaks first, this ends with somebody’s career.
So I don’t give them the joke.
“No.”
Vance turns. “I’m sorry?”
“She’s the coxswain. She goes in the middle, in the front, with the box in her hand, since that’s where she is in every photograph any crew has ever taken.” I walk over, pick the cox box up off the bench, and put it in Reese’s hands. “And nobody’s covering anything.”
“Mr. Monroe, I’m trying to protect her.”
“I know you are. You’re the first person from that building who’s tried, and I’d like you to hear that I mean it.
” I face her properly. “Here’s the part you’re not accounting for.
If she stands in the back with her collar up, then every one of those sites has a photograph of a program that put her in the back with her collar up.
That’s the story. Not the mark. The hiding. ”
Vance doesn’t answer straight away.
“That’s a media strategy.”
“It’s the only one available.”
“You’ve thought about this.”
“Since about six this morning.”
Behind me, Zane says very quietly, “He does this.”
Vance looks past me at Bennett, who’s had his cap in his hands this entire time and hasn’t put it on.
“Coach?”
“She’s my coxswain,” Bennett says. “Put her where she sits.”
Vance closes her folder and stops arguing.
The photographer moves us three times, and Vance stops fussing after the second setup.
Bennett stands at the end of the front row because I ask him to, and I ask him in front of Vance so there’s no version where he says no.
Bo ends up behind Reese with his hands at his sides.
Cameron won’t take the jacket off and nobody argues about it.
Jackson looks at the camera the entire time and doesn’t blink once.
That photograph is going to come out strange, and nobody will be able to say why.
Reese sits in front with the box in her lap, the mark on her throat, and her chin up. The photographer takes six hundred frames and we’re done in fifty minutes.
Afterward everybody drifts. Jackson goes straight up to the erg room. Bo takes Zane and Tyler back to the house, and Zane’s talking before the truck doors shut. He talks when he’s rattled, and he’s been rattled since six.
I find Reese on the edge of the dock with her shoes off and her feet not quite in the water. I sit beside her and watch a novice crew at the far end butcher a start sequence.
“You were good in there,” she says.
“That’s the job.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Usually I’d have something ready for that. I don’t, and it takes me a second to notice I’m not looking for anything either.
“I had a line ready in there,” I tell her. “I’ve had a line ready in every room I’ve ever walked into.”
“Why didn’t you use it?”
“Because it would’ve worked.” The novice crew manages to catch a crab almost in unison, which shouldn’t be possible. “That’s the problem with being funny. It works. Everybody laughs, the bad moment goes away, and nothing actually changes. The room just feels better about whatever happened.”
Reese lets me sit with that instead of filling the silence.
“I’ve been doing it to you since the first week. Every time this house has needed somebody to sit still in a hard conversation, I’ve found a way to make it easier instead.”
“You’re very good at it.”
“I know. That’s what makes it work.”
She turns her head and looks at me. I can feel it, so I make myself look back.
“Keep going.”
“You told a reporter about your father three days ago, and I drove you home and made two jokes before we got there. One of them was about coffee.” I look down at my hands on the edge of the dock.
“I’ve watched everybody else figure out what he can give you.
Bo feeds you. Gray decides things. Tyler finds things out.
Jackson stands in front of you. I make people comfortable, and I keep wondering when that stopped being useful. ”
“Beckett.”
“I’m not fishing. Don’t talk me out of it.”
“I know you’re not.” She puts her hand flat on the dock beside mine, close but not touching. “Do you want to hear what you actually did in there?”
“Not especially.”
“Tough.” She waits until I look at her again.
“Vance was going to move me, and everybody in that bay knew it. Gray could’ve told her no.
Jackson could’ve scared the shit out of her.
Bo could’ve stood there looking enormous until she got uncomfortable.
None of that would’ve fixed it. It would’ve turned into a fight in front of a photographer. ”
“So?”
“So you gave her a way to change her mind without making her the bad guy. You stopped her, got exactly what you wanted, and somehow left her feeling like she’d helped.”
I look back toward the novice crew. They’ve gotten the crab sorted out and are trying the sequence again.
“That sounds manipulative.”
“It probably is a little.”
“Great. Much better.”
“It is better.” Reese bumps her shoulder against mine. “You think your job is making everybody comfortable because that’s the part they notice. It isn’t.”
“What is it, then?”
“You know how to run a room.”
I turn to look at her.
“You always know who’s about to speak, who shouldn’t, who needs an out, and what everybody wants before they say it. You’ve been able to do that the entire time. You just use it to get laughs so nobody asks you to do anything harder with it.”
The novice crew takes a proper stroke, then another. I watch them get four in before somebody rushes the slide.
“That’s a hell of an accusation.”
“It’s an observation. You’ll survive it.”
I look at her hand beside mine. Five people asked me about the article today, and none of them got a different answer. I built those seventeen words before sunrise because I knew exactly what would happen if I didn’t.
Maybe she’s got a point.
I turn my hand over. She puts hers in it, and neither of us says anything for the length of a whole piece. It’s the first silence I’ve had with anybody in years that I don’t feel responsible for fixing.
“They’ll want dinner,” she says eventually.
“They always do.”
“Then we should go.”
“In a minute.” I stand and pull her up with me. I don’t let go once she’s on her feet, and she doesn’t take her hand back. “I’m not making a single joke in that truck.”
“Good.”
“I might make one small one.”
“Beckett.”
“Extremely small. Barely a joke at all.”
She gets a fistful of my shirt, pulls me down, and kisses me.
That works too. Nobody’s ever tried it before.