CHAPTER THREE
Tala
Day two begins with a quiz.
Not a written quiz — Nerys Quillan does not seem like the type to hand out worksheets, and if she ever tried, I would assume the world was ending.
But it's a quiz nonetheless. She walks me through eighteen hypothetical scenarios on the practice green, each one a decision point: wind from the left, pin tucked behind a bunker, fifteen feet of break, hard green, soft green, uphill, downhill, side-hill, rain, heat, cold, firm conditions, receptive conditions.
For each one, she asks the same question.
"What do you see?"
And for each one, I give her the right answer.
I know the right answer. That's the part nobody understands about me.
The commentators, the sponsors, the three caddies I've dismissed — they all think I'm ignorant.
That I attack blindly. That I'm some kind of golfing berserker who walks onto the course and starts clubbing the ball in whatever direction feels exciting.
I know the correct shot. I always know the correct shot. The problem has never been identification.
The problem is that knowing the correct shot and choosing to hit it are two entirely different psychological events, and the gap between them is where I've built my entire career.
Nerys does not appear surprised by my answers. She does not appear impressed, disappointed, or emotionally responsive in any visible way. She writes something in her notebook after each scenario, nods, and moves to the next.
This is maddening.
I'm accustomed to people reacting to me.
Coaches who praise my intelligence. Caddies who look relieved when I demonstrate competence.
Commentators who call me "savvy" with the faintly shocked tone of people who expected a beautiful woman to be stupid.
I generate reactions. It's part of my operating system.
When I walk into a room, I can feel the atmosphere adjust around me, and I calibrate my behavior to keep that adjustment happening.
Nerys Quillan's atmosphere does not adjust.
She stands beside the practice green in the same uniform as yesterday — black trousers, white polo, sleeves rolled to the elbow, plain steel watch, no logos except the swoosh on her shoes that is probably contractual.
Her hair is pushed behind her ears. The silver streak catches the Arizona light every time she turns her head, and I've been tracking it the way I track wind flags on the course — involuntarily, constantly, with a precision that is starting to embarrass me.
She is also, in the oblique morning sun, unreasonably tall.
I am five-six. I have been five-six since I was sixteen.
I have never felt short. I grew up around my father's mechanics, who were mostly compact men from the same part of Mexico as my grandparents, and my mother, who is five-three and generates more authority per square inch than anyone else I've ever met.
My height has never been a variable I notice.
I notice it now.
Nerys is at least six feet, possibly six-one, and she doesn't diminish herself.
No rounded shoulders, no concessive lean, no tilting her head down to meet shorter people on their level.
She stands at full extension with the posture of a woman who learned early that she would always be seen and decided to be seen on her own terms.
When she looks at me, she looks down. Not condescendingly. Geometrically. There are six inches between us, and those six inches contain a quantity of erotic potential I am not prepared to unpack before nine in the morning.
"Scenario nineteen," she says.
"We only discussed eighteen."
"This one is different." She indicates the practice green. A ball sits fifteen feet from the hole, left-to-right break, gentle downhill. "Show me your pre-putt routine."
I walk to the ball. Two waggles. Read the break. Settle over the putt. Stroke it.
The ball rolls on a perfect line and drops into the center of the cup.
I look at Nerys. She is not watching the ball. She is watching my hands.
"Again," she says.
I set up another putt. Same distance. This time a right-to-left break. I run through the routine. Stroke the putt. It drops.
"Again. Twenty-two feet."
I move to a longer putt. The green here is slightly more complex — a subtle ridge runs through the middle, creating a double break. I read it, set up, and roll the ball to three inches from the hole. Not in, but a tap-in par on any course in the world.
"Your stroke is excellent," Nerys says.
"Thank you."
"Your hands are wrong."
I straighten up. The putter is still in my grip, and I can feel the familiar irritation climbing up through my chest — the hot, tight sensation that precedes every argument I've ever had with someone who told me I was doing something incorrectly while I was actively doing it well.
"My putting stats are top fifteen on tour."
"From inside eight feet, you're top five.
You're elite. Your stroke is mechanically sound, your read is usually accurate, and your pace control is exceptional for someone your age.
" She pauses. The pause is surgical — placed precisely where my ego has enough room to absorb the compliment before the correction arrives.
"From outside eight feet, you're thirty-seventh. "
I blink.
"Your grip pressure increases before every putt over eight feet.
You choke the putter. Your right hand takes over, and the face closes a fraction at impact.
Under neutral conditions, you pull everything left.
Under tournament pressure, the effect doubles.
It's why you miss breaking putts from distance under pressure, and it's why your statistics bifurcate so sharply at the eight-foot threshold. "
I stare at her. She holds the gaze. Those gray-green eyes are steady and unperformative and looking at me with the particular intensity of a woman who has done the math and is very certain of her answer.
"Nobody's caught that," I say. For the second time in two days.
"Your previous caddies were working from the outside in — watching your stroke and trying to correct the outcome. I'm working from the inside out. The stroke is fine. The grip is the problem, and the grip is a reflection of something upstream."
"Upstream meaning what?"
"Meaning that when you stand over a putt you know you should make, you become afraid of missing, and that fear travels from your mind through your shoulders into your hands, and your hands respond by tightening.
Tighter grip, closed face, pulled putt, missed left.
It's a cascade, and it begins before the putter moves. "
She says all of this the way a meteorologist explains weather. No judgment. No sympathy. Just the system, described accurately.
I should be offended. I should be furious. I should do what I've done with every other caddie who tried to correct my putting — tell her my stats speak for themselves and remind her that I'm the one with a tour card.
Instead, I think about every long putt I've missed under pressure in the last three years. Left. Always left. Every single one.
"May I?" she says.
The words are simple. Two syllables. A request for permission to enter my physical space and adjust the thing she's identified as broken.
"Yeah."
She sets her notebook on the edge of the green.
Walks toward me. Her stride is unhurried and precise, and I'm suddenly aware that I'm standing in a very large, very empty practice facility with a woman who is about to touch me, and my heart rate has escalated to a level that is professionally inappropriate for a putting lesson.
She moves behind me.
Not beside me — behind. The height difference means I can feel her presence along the entire length of my back without any contact occurring. She is warm. The Arizona morning is warm. The air between us is warm in a different and more specific way.
Her hands come over mine on the putter grip.
The contact is — I don't have a word. Professional is the word I should use and would use if someone asked me about it later.
Her fingers are long and dry and precise, and they settle over my knuckles with the deliberate pressure of someone who has spent a lifetime understanding exactly how grip translates into outcome.
The scar on her right thumb presses against the back of my hand.
But professional doesn't cover what happens in my body when Nerys Quillan's hands close over mine.
It starts at the contact point — my knuckles, the backs of my fingers — and moves through my wrists into my forearms and then radiates outward into my shoulders, my chest, the base of my spine. A flush of warmth that is not temperature. An awareness so specific it has texture.
Her forearms bracket mine. I can see the lean muscle beneath the rolled sleeves, the fine dark hair on her wrists, the steel watch face catching the light. Her arms are longer than mine by several inches, and the effect is encompassing — I am inside the frame of her body without being held.
"Here," she says.
Her voice is close. Closer than I expected. She's leaning down slightly to see the grip from my perspective, and her breath moves the hair behind my right ear.
"You're gripping with your palms. Feel how the pressure is concentrated here —" she presses gently on the heel of my left hand "— and here.
" The heel of my right. "That's palm grip.
It's strong. It's stable. And it's too rigid for putting, because palms activate the forearms and forearms activate the shoulders and shoulders create tension. "
She adjusts my left thumb. A quarter-inch. Maybe less. The movement is minimal and absolutely devastating, because to make it she has to slide her thumb across mine, and the friction of that slide — dry skin, slow, exact — sends a pulse of heat directly into my stomach.
"Grip with your fingers instead. Feel the difference. The putter is lighter in your hands."