Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Reese
Tyler makes Bo stop the van at the student health center at twelve past five in the morning so he can put an envelope in the after-hours slot.
It takes nine seconds. We watch him do it through the windshield, headlights on him, and when he climbs back in nobody says anything for a mile.
“That’s it?” Zane asks finally.
“Eight registrations, one packet.” Tyler puts his seatbelt on. “Morrison’s order is satisfied as of the timestamp on that slot. Five-twelve.”
“You checked the timestamp.”
“I photographed the slot.”
Beckett makes a noise from the back. “Of course you did.”
I sit in the middle bench with Cameron’s jacket over my knees, and I think about the fact that a week ago I was a woman with a designation nobody could prove and now I’m a line item in a university database. It should feel worse than it does.
The bus is a coach with reclining seats and a bathroom nobody uses twice. Bennett takes the front row. Wilder takes the row behind him and falls asleep before we’re out of the county.
The blood panel comes back at 7:40.
I read it twice on my phone with the sun coming up over the median. It’s two pages, most of it numbers I don’t understand. The line that matters is near the bottom.
Designation: Omega. Underneath, Confirmed by serum marker analysis
Then a date, a lab code, and the name of a physician I met for six minutes.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Four years of my life, and it fits on one line of a PDF.
Bo’s watching me from across the aisle.
“It’s fine,” I tell him.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were about to.”
“I was about to ask if you wanted my headphones.” He holds them up. “But sure. Let’s do it your way.”
I take them. He doesn’t say anything else for two hours. I fall asleep somewhere past the state line and wake up with my head on the window and his jacket over me. I don’t remember him putting it there.
The venue is a man-made course cut through flat farmland. Six lanes, a grandstand on the west bank, and parking for a small city. We get there at one. The hotel is fifteen minutes away, and the lobby is full of enormous people in matching sweatpants.
Bennett hands out keys. Bo with Jackson, Tyler with Eli, Beckett with Cameron, Zane with Gray, and a single for me on a different floor. It isn’t subtle. Nobody comments.
We have course access at five. I’ve got three hours and nothing to do with them.
That lasts until my phone rings at 1:35.
The screen says C. CARMINE, and I know before I answer it.
“Ms. Callahan. Are you somewhere you can talk?”
I sit down on the end of the bed. “Go ahead.”
“The compliance office received a formal challenge to your eligibility at eleven this morning. It came through the conference rather than through us, which means I found out about it forty minutes ago, the same as everyone else.” She’s talking fast, which she doesn’t do.
“It cites your amended registration and the article. It asks the regatta committee to review whether Sable Ridge certified an ineligible athlete.”
“Harrison.”
“It’s filed by an attorney on behalf of an anonymous complainant, and I’m not going to speculate on the record.”
“And off it?”
“Off it, there are maybe three people in this state with the standing and the temperament, and two of them have no reason to care.” She lets that sit for a second.
“Here’s the part you need to hear. The committee doesn’t want to adjudicate a designation dispute the day before heats.
They want it gone. The fastest way to make it gone is to scratch the entry the complaint attaches to and let everyone go rowing. ”
“Scratch me.”
“Scratch the bonded pair.”
I stop breathing for a second.
“Run that by me again.”
“You and Mr. Lockwood are the two names on the registration packet that touch this complaint. You’re the coxswain whose status is challenged and he’s the bonded partner named in the article.
The cleanest thing available to the committee is to pull both of you and certify the rest of the boat with substitutes.
” Her voice doesn’t change. “I want to be clear that I think it’s cowardly and I’ve said so to three people this morning.
It’s also what they’ll do by tonight if nothing changes. ”
“They’d scratch the stroke seat the night before heats.”
“They’d scratch anybody, at any hour, if it made a problem go away.”
I put my free hand flat on the bedspread.
“What changes it?”
“Somebody with standing tells the committee an adult falsified the registration of a minor, and that the minor isn’t the one who filed it.
” Carmine takes a breath. “Which is what your article says. But an article isn’t a statement.
They need it sworn, from the person who did it, in front of a committee, today. ”
“My father will never do that.”
“Then get me somebody who will.”
“There isn’t anybody else. He’s the only person alive who signed that form.”
“I’m aware.” She goes quiet for a second.
“Ms. Callahan, I’m going to do something now that will get me a conversation with my director if it comes out.
There’s a hearing room at the hotel and a committee that convenes at four.
Whoever walks in before they vote is the whole game. Afterward it stops being about facts.”
I hang up and sit on the end of a hotel bed and think about my father’s face on a firm website.
Then I go and find Gray.
He’s in the hallway outside his room with his phone in his hand, and he already knows. Of course he does. His name is on the complaint next to mine.
“Carmine?” I ask.
“Bennett. Two minutes ago.” He looks at me with nothing on his face at all. That’s how I know how bad it is. “They’re going to pull us both.”
“I know.”
“Reese.” He puts the phone in his pocket. “I want you to hear this from me before anybody organizes anything. If it comes down to one of us, it’s me. Say the word and I’ll withdraw myself and the complaint has nothing to attach to.”
“That’s not how it works and you know it. The complaint is about my registration. You’re just the man standing next to it.”
“Then let me be the man standing next to it somewhere else.”
“No.”
“Reese.”
“I said no, and I’m going to keep saying it, and I need you to do something harder than falling on a sword.
” I make myself stop and think about what he needs me to say.
“Go tell the other seven what’s happening.
Then keep all eight of you off that phone.
Nobody calls your father. Nobody calls a lawyer. Nobody calls my mother.”
His jaw goes tight. “Why?”
“Because I know exactly one person who can fix this and I’d rather cut my own hand off than dial him.”
Gray looks at me for a second.
“Then don’t dial him,” he says.
“That’s not helpful.”
“It’s not advice. It’s an observation.” He steps back from the door. “He’ll already know, Reese. It’s been on every rowing site since eleven.”
I go back to my room, put my phone face down on the desk, and stare at it for twenty minutes while I try to muster up the courage to call my father. I’m unsuccessful.
At 3:20 there’s a knock on the door.
My father is in the hallway in a charcoal suit with a leather folio under his arm. He hasn’t slept. There’s nobody with him.
“May I come in?”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Atlanta.” He doesn’t dress it up. “She isn’t coming.”
I stand in the doorway with my hand on the frame and don’t move. He waits. Neither of us says anything until my hand starts to ache.
“I’m not here to talk about the article,” he says. “There’s a committee at four and I need to be in front of it before they vote. I’d rather do that with your permission than without it, but I’m going to do it either way, so this is a courtesy and I want to be honest that it’s a courtesy.”
“You knew before I called anybody.”
“I read the article the morning it ran.” He shifts the folio. “I’ve been in the car since before dawn. I found out about the complaint at a gas station somewhere in South Carolina, a little after eleven, from somebody at the firm.”
“You were already driving here.”
“Yes.”
“Before the complaint.”
“Yes.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I step back and let him in.
He doesn’t sit. He puts the folio on the desk and opens it. Inside is a stack of tabbed paper, and the top page is a copy of an amended designation registration form with my name on it and a signature at the bottom that isn’t mine.
“I’ve drafted a sworn statement,” he says.
“It says that on the fourteenth of April four years ago I filed an amended designation for a sixteen-year-old, that the amendment was materially false, that I knew it was false when I filed it, and that she had no knowledge of the filing until she was eighteen.” He turns the page around so it faces me.
“It says why. I’ve written the reason down.
I won’t be reading it to you in this room, but it’s in there and it’s accurate. ”
I look at the page but I don’t read it.
“You know what this does to you.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a bar complaint. That’s your license.”
“It is,” he agrees. “It’ll go to grievance. Given the facts and given who I know, I expect a private reprimand and a very unpleasant year.” He says it the same as he’d say a filing deadline. “That’s the honest assessment. I’d rather you have it than a story about how I fell on a sword.”
“That’s not a sword. That’s a paper cut.”
“I’m aware of the difference.”
“Then why are you here?”
He straightens up. He’s fifty-three and he looks older than he did in April.
“Because I sat in a room three weeks ago and listened to Harrison Lockwood explain how he was going to end a girl’s eligibility to make his son come home,” he says.
“And I agreed with him. I want you to know that. I sat there and I thought it was reasonable.” He looks at the folio instead of me.
“It took me until the drive back to work out why it sounded so familiar.”
I don’t say anything.
“I’m not asking you to forgive that. I’d think less of you.” He closes the folio. “The committee convenes at four. Whatever you decide about me afterward is yours.”
“I didn’t ask you to come.”
“No. You didn’t.” He picks up the folio and puts it under his arm. “That’s rather the point.”
The hearing room is a hotel conference space with a folding partition and a coffee urn nobody’s touched. Seven people sit at a long table. Carmine at the end, not sitting with them. Bennett in the second row with his cap in his hands.
I’m not allowed in. Neither is Gray. We sit in two chairs in the corridor outside with the door shut, and I can hear the sound of my father’s voice through it but can’t make out a single word.
Gray doesn’t try to talk to me. He puts his hand palm up on his knee and leaves it there, and after a few minutes I put mine in it.
The hearing takes forty minutes.
The door opens at 4:41. My father comes out first and looks at the wall over my head instead of at me. His jaw is set in a shape I’ve seen in my own mirror. He walks past us down the corridor without a word.
Carmine comes out second.
“You’re certified,” she says. “Both of you. The committee accepted the statement, dismissed the challenge as moot, and asked me to inform the complainant’s counsel that the matter is closed.” She’s holding a single sheet of paper and her hand isn’t quite steady. “You race at nine-forty tomorrow.”
Gray’s breath goes out of him.
“What happens to him?” I ask.
“That’s the state bar’s business, not mine.” Carmine looks down the empty corridor after him. “He asked me one thing before he went in. He asked whether you’d be in the room. I told him no. He said good.”
She puts the sheet in my hand and heads for the elevators.
I catch my father in the parking lot with one hand on the car door. He turns at my voice, keys still clenched in his fist, and for a second we just look at each other.
I don’t thank him. I can’t. He built the thing he just risked his license to undo, and we both know it.
So I give him the only thing I can.
“We’re in lane four at nine-forty. West bank has the better view of the finish.”
He looks at me for a second before sighing and nodding his head once. “I’ll be there.”
“I know.”
He gets in the car. I stay where I am until he pulls out, then head back inside, where seven men are doing a terrible job of pretending they haven’t been watching through the lobby windows.
Beckett reaches me first. “Well?”
“We’re certified.”
Zane makes a sound I’ve never heard come out of a human being. Bo closes his eyes and drops his head. Tyler says, “Nine-forty,” like he’s confirming it for himself and immediately starts typing on his phone.
Jackson doesn’t say anything. He turns and walks straight out the side door. Through the glass, I watch him stop in the parking lot and put both hands on top of his head. Nobody goes after him.
He’ll come back when he’s ready.
Later, I’m on the balcony outside my room, looking toward the course lights nine minutes away, when Tyler finds me.
“You should know something. The complaint was withdrawn twenty minutes ago.”
I look over. “Dismissed?”
“Withdrawn. By the attorney who filed it.”
“Harrison cutting his losses.”
“That’s the obvious read.” Tyler adjusts his glasses and leans against the railing beside me. “But Kinsley Adams was expelled on Tuesday. Sophia’s statement hit the Title IX file Monday. The article ran Wednesday and put your father’s name in the second paragraph. Now the complaint disappears.”
I follow him there. “Quinton’s out of moves.”
“On paper.” Tyler looks toward the course. “That’s what bothers me. I’ve watched him play the long game for two months, and now every piece he was using is gone. He can’t hide behind Kinsley. He can’t use the complaint.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning he just lost the board.” Tyler keeps his eyes on the lights. “People like that don’t stop. They stop being careful.”
Down at the course, somebody’s running a launch up the lane with the lights on, and the wake goes out flat and silver across all six lanes.
A thought hits me.
“He’s here.”
Tyler doesn’t ask who I mean. “Signed in at the media gate at two this afternoon. Guest credential. Somebody in the athletic department cleared it.”
I keep my eyes on the water.
“Tell the others.”
“I will.”
“Not tonight, though. Tomorrow morning, before we launch.” I glance at him. “And tell Jackson last.”