Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Gray
She lies to me at nine in the morning and I let her.
We’re on the dock doing nothing useful, an hour and a half out from the semifinal, and she’s got both hands wrapped around a coffee she hasn’t drunk any of.
“You slept,” I say.
“Some.”
“How much?”
“Enough.” She looks out at the course. “Ask me something else.”
Two months ago, I’d have pushed. I know exactly how I’d have done it, too. I’d have asked Tyler what time she went quiet in the group chat last night, come back with a number, and put it in front of her. I’d have called that caring about her.
Instead, I drink my own coffee and ask her about the start. “What’s the plan?”
Her shoulders come down a little. “Same as yesterday, one beat lower off the settle. Forecast has a crosswind at fifteen hundred, and I want somewhere to go if it lands.”
“Thirty-four.”
“Thirty-four, and I’ll want it clean.”
“You’ll get it clean.”
She finally takes a drink. I let myself look at her while she’s not watching me do it, and there’s nothing obviously wrong except that she’s twenty years old and looks about ten years past that. I put it down to the last eight days, which turns out to be my mistake.
Six lanes at eleven-forty. Top three to the final.
We draw lane two. Three heat winners, seeded on raw time, and we’re the slowest of them by a second and a half, because yesterday she took the rate off us at eleven hundred and made us hold it.
The grandstand is a long way off from there, and the wind will find us before it finds anybody else.
Reese doesn’t complain. She takes us out early and spends nine minutes running the point, testing the crosswind, putting the bow where she wants it and letting it drift so she can feel how much rudder it’s going to cost her.
Bennett watches from the launch and says nothing.
At eleven-thirty-eight, we back into the blocks. Cameron locks the bow on. Somewhere down the line, Hampton Hills’ coxswain is giving his crew a speech, but our boat is silent. Reese doesn’t do speeches before semifinals.
“Thirty-four and long,” she says. “Nobody’s a hero for eight hundred meters.”
The starter calls attention, the boat goes still, and when the horn blasts, Reese says, “Row.”
We’re off clean.
The first five hundred is the best rowing we’ve done all year.
I mean that. Thirty-four, exactly where she put it, with so much run under the boat it feels like cheating.
We’re a seat up on Northridge and half a length on the rest of the field, and I’m not working nearly as hard as I should be.
That’s what happens when eight men stop trying to move a boat and start letting it move.
At eight hundred, Reese says, “Beautiful. Hold it here.”
At nine hundred and forty, her face changes.
I’m three feet away and the only man in the boat with a clear view of her, so I see the whole thing happen.
Her pupils blow out and her chin comes up half an inch.
Her mouth is already open for the next call, but nothing comes.
Then her right hand slips off the rudder line and lands palm-up in her lap, and the cox box goes silent.
Later, I count eight strokes on the video. At thirty-four, it’s about fourteen seconds. In the boat, it lasts forever.
Her eyes are open, but she’s not looking at anything. Her body stays upright, one hand loose in her lap, while the boat starts walking off its point. There’s three feet between us and I can’t cross any of it, since both my hands are on the oar.
If I let go, we’re done. Not just the race.
The season. You don’t restart a national semifinal because your coxswain disappeared for fourteen seconds, and everything these eight men have spent since coming to Sable Ridge goes into the water with me.
But if I keep rowing and she doesn’t come back, we’re going to cross into lane three at full pressure.
Bo feels it too. His blade goes light for half a stroke behind me, then comes back in hard with his timing exactly where it belongs. He can’t say anything without telling the whole boat something’s wrong, but he doesn’t have to. He’s got the boat if I need to watch her.
The bow keeps walking left. Two feet, then four, and every instinct I have says to do something.
Instead, I hold thirty-four.
I don’t shout at her or call the crew. I don’t throw a hand up for the umpire. I keep my eyes on Reese and the rate exactly where she put it, since if she comes back to a boat that’s fallen apart, she’ll have nothing to steer. If she comes back to thirty-four, she’ll have everything.
She told me not to buy her season. This is the same thing with water under it.
By stroke six, the bow is eight feet off point and Northridge’s coxswain is shouting at us. On seven, I say her name, not loud and not like a command. Just the way I’d say it if she were in the next room.
“Reese.”
One more stroke, and her eyes focus.
Her hand closes around the rudder line and she takes one breath. That’s all she needs. Inside it, she reads the point, the lane, the bow walk, the rate, and Northridge pulling level with us.
“Down two on port, three strokes. One. Two. Three. Point’s back. Sorry, gentlemen.” She doesn’t leave enough of a gap for anyone to answer. “Thirteen hundred. Northridge’s got their nose on us. Let them have it for four hundred meters.”
Nobody in the boat except me and Bo knows anything happened.
The crosswind hits at fifteen hundred exactly when she said it would, and she has somewhere to go since she left herself that beat. “Up one, in two. One. Two.”
Thirty-five.
Northridge answers, but they can’t hold it. We take their seat back at seventeen hundred and go through them at eighteen-fifty. Reese keeps us there and brings us across the line second by a canvas behind a crew that’s been favored all season.
Second is a lane in the final.
“Way enough.”
Eight blades come off the water, and the boat runs on beneath us while the men behind me start making noise. Zane is telling anyone who’ll listen that she called the crosswind to the meter, Beckett is laughing at nothing, and Jackson has his head tipped back with his eyes closed.
Reese sits in the stern with one hand still on the rudder line and looks at me. She knows exactly what I saw, but I don’t say a word about it on the water. Neither does Bo.
The medical tent is two hundred meters from the dock, and I know she isn’t going to it. Two months ago, I would’ve told her she was. Today, I don’t even suggest it.
Instead, I stay beside her at the trailer while Tyler and Eli take the riggers down. We work for about five minutes before she asks quietly, “Fourteen seconds?”
“Eight strokes.”
“Did anybody see?”
“Bo felt it. Nobody saw except me.”
She nods, looking down at the hull. “Northridge’s coxswain is going to file a lane complaint.”
“Let him. We got the point back.”
“Gray.”
“I know.”
She turns toward me. “You held thirty-four.”
“There wasn’t anything else to hold.”
For a few seconds, all I hear is metal against metal from the other end of the trailer and somebody laughing two crews down.
“You could’ve stopped the boat,” she says. “You’d have been within your rights as captain. Bennett would’ve backed you, and nobody in the sport would’ve blinked.”
“I know that too.”
“Why didn’t you?”
I put my palm against the hull. The shell is still warm from the sun. “Because you’d have come back in a stopped boat, and you’d have known that the second something went wrong, I took it away from you.”
She doesn’t answer, and I don’t let the silence turn my decision into something noble.
“It was a bad call, Reese. If you’d been gone another eight strokes, I’d have put us into lane three at full pressure and somebody would be in an ambulance right now.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“No.”
“And we didn’t.”
“No.”
She studies my face. “So was it a bad call?”
“Yes.” I look at her. “It was also the right one. Both can be true.”
“Would you do it again?”
“Yes.”
That answer comes too easily, but there’s no point lying about it.
Reese reaches out and gets a fistful of my shirt. She doesn’t pull me toward her. She just holds on, standing beside a boat trailer in front of nine crews with her chin up and my mark plain on her throat.
“Don’t tell the others.”
“Reese.”
“Not today. There’s a final tomorrow and eight men who need to sleep tonight. You tell them now, not one of them will.” Her grip tightens. “Tomorrow night. After the final. I’ll tell them myself.”
I don’t like it, but it’s reasonable. Worse, it’s the same thing I’d ask for in her place.
“Tomorrow night.”
“Thank you.”
We finish the trailer. Bennett takes us back to the hotel and gives the room a ten-minute talk about the final that mostly amounts to eat something and go to bed. At the door, he stops with his hands in his pockets.
“Whatever’s happened this weekend, that was the best semifinal I’ve ever had a crew row for me.”
Then he leaves before anybody can answer, which is probably why Bennett doesn’t give speeches either.
At four-fifty that afternoon, Reese’s phone rings.
We’re in the lobby. Half the crew is on the floor around a low table playing with a deck of cards Zane borrowed from the front desk. Tyler is reading the lane draw. I’m in a chair by the window with my legs stretched out in front of me, doing nothing, which I’ve only recently learned how to do.
Reese looks at her screen and stands. “I’ve got to take this.”
Nobody looks up except me.
She walks through the glass doors into the parking lot but doesn’t go far, stopping near a planter about fifteen feet from the building with her back to us.
Through the glass, I watch her say three or four words and then listen.
After a few seconds, she puts her free hand on top of the planter and leans some of her weight into it.
She asks one question, listens again, then says something I can’t hear and lowers the phone. For about twenty seconds she stays exactly where she is.
I’m out of my chair before I decide to be, but I only make it as far as the doors.
I can see her shoulders from here. They’re set exactly as they get in the ninety seconds before she walks into a room where somebody wants something from her. She’s putting her face on, and if I go outside, she’ll have to put it on faster.
So I go back to my chair.
A minute later, Reese comes through the doors looking fine.
Better than fine. She takes the deck out of Zane’s hands and deals him out of a hand he was already losing.
She tells Tyler the lane draw won’t post until eight and he should stop refreshing it.
On her way past Cameron, she puts a hand on the back of his neck before dropping onto the floor with the rest of them.
“Everything all right?” Bo asks.
“Compliance. Paperwork on the registration. It’s handled.”
Nobody questions it.
I do, but not because there’s a tell. That’s the problem. It’s a complete sentence delivered flat, with no adjustment for the fact that eight men are listening. Until this morning, I’d only ever heard Reese lie to somebody who wanted to hurt her.
I sit in my chair and say nothing.
At nine she lied to me about how little she’d slept, and I let her. I could’ve gone around her, asked Tyler, found the answer and put it in front of her. Two months ago, I would’ve called that love.
That one was a bad night’s sleep. This is heavier, and I could follow her upstairs later. I could ask Bo what he noticed or get Tyler to start digging. Between the eight of us, we’d probably have an answer before dinner.
Two months ago, I would’ve done that too.
Instead, I sit by the window with my hands empty and watch the woman I love play cards with my crew. She asked for tomorrow night, so I give her tomorrow night.
I put my head back against the chair and close my eyes.