CHAPTER FOUR #2
The temperature has exceeded a hundred degrees. The heat shimmers over the fairways. Tala's face is flushed and her jaw is set and she is playing with the furious energy of a woman who has committed to a course of action and will not be the first to flinch.
She is also playing badly.
Not technically — her ball-striking remains excellent. Her swing is sound. Her short game is sharp when she selects the appropriate shot. But she is not selecting the appropriate shot. She is selecting the shot that feels most like defiance, and defiance is an emotional strategy, not a scoring one.
She misses the cut by four strokes.
In the scoring tent, she signs her card without looking at me. I stand behind the ropes and record the final numbers in my yardage book.
Expected score with strategy: 69.
Actual score: 76.
Differential: +7.
Deviations from recommended strategy: 11.
Deviations resulting in strokes lost: 8.
I close the book and walk to the parking lot.
·
The lot is half-empty. The afternoon groups are still on the course. A volunteer is washing a golf cart near the entrance, and the sound of the hose is the only thing between us and the kind of silence that precedes arguments.
Tala is loading her bag into the trunk of her rental.
She does this herself — always, I've noticed.
She does not hand the bag to me. She does not leave it for someone else to manage.
She carries her own equipment the way she carries everything: alone, without asking, as if requesting help would be an admission that she cannot manage the weight.
I set my course notebook on the hood of my car, parked two spaces away. I wait.
She closes the trunk. Turns. Her face is flushed from the heat and from something else — the combustible mixture of anger and embarrassment that I recognize because I have felt it in my own body on courses I would prefer not to remember.
"Your plan was too conservative," she says.
I have been expecting this sentence for approximately four hours. I have also been preparing my response for approximately four hours, which means I have had time to remove the anger and leave only the precision.
"My plan accounted for ambient temperature, green firmness, wind patterns, your driver dispersion on Bermuda fairways, your statistical drop-off from distances exceeding two-sixty on approach shots, and the scoring history of every hole on this course over the past five years."
"It didn't account for me having a good day."
"You were having a good day. Through six holes, you were one under par and in position to shoot sixty-eight. The plan was working."
"It didn't feel like it was working. It felt like I was playing someone else's game."
"You were playing the game most likely to produce the lowest score."
"I don't care about the lowest score. I care about—"
She stops. She knows what she was about to say. We both know.
"You care about being seen," I finish. "You care about the broadcast reel. The commentator calling you fearless. The gallery gasping at the shot nobody else would try. You chose to perform. Those are different activities."
"Different from what?"
"From winning."
The word drops between us like a club on concrete. She flinches. Not visibly — her jaw tightens, her shoulders pull inward by a fraction, and her eyes, which have been holding mine with combative steadiness, flicker downward for a half-second before returning.
I walk to her car. I pick up the bag from where she's wedged it in the trunk. I carry it three steps and set it on the asphalt beside the driver's side door.
"I will work with a player who disagrees with me. I expect disagreement. I welcome it. If your reasoning is sound, I will adjust the plan. That is how partnership operates."
I straighten. She's watching me with an expression I haven't seen from her before — not defiance, not charm, not the camera-ready poise. Something rawer. Something that looks, if I'm being honest with myself, like a woman who has just realized she might lose something she assumed she could keep.
"I will not carry the bag for a player who never intended to listen.
Disagreement requires having heard the argument.
You didn't disagree with my strategy today.
You dismissed it. You let me stand beside you for eighteen holes believing we were working together while you played the game you were always going to play, and that is not disagreement. That is disrespect."
I let the sentence settle. The parking lot is quiet. The hose has stopped. A dry wind moves across the asphalt, carrying dust and the faint mineral smell of the course.
"If you want an audience rather than a caddie, the trial ends here. There is no penalty. No financial consequence. You owe me nothing except honesty about which one you're looking for."
I walk toward my car. My keys are in my right hand. My notebook is on the hood where I left it. I have taken four steps when she speaks.
"Nerys."
I stop. I do not turn. This is deliberate. If she wants to say something worth hearing, she can say it to my back. I've spent enough of this day facing her while she ignored me.
"I'm sorry."
Two words. Spoken without the characteristic speed that I've come to associate with Tala's speech. Slower. Lower. As if the words are traveling through something dense on their way out.
"Not the kind where I say it and then do the same thing tomorrow. I'll try."
I turn.
She is standing beside her car with her hands at her sides.
Not in her pockets, not crossed over her chest, not gripping anything.
Just at her sides, open and visible, and the vulnerability of that posture from a woman who armors herself with motion is more persuasive than anything she could have said.
Her chin is not lifted. Her jaw is not set.
The defiance has left her body and what remains is a woman who is younger than me by seventeen years and has just been told by someone she hired that she wasted both their days, and instead of firing me or arguing or storming off, she is standing still and apologizing without qualification.
The compactness of her body. The way her shoulders have dropped from their combative height to something approaching honesty.
The flush on her cheeks that might be heat and might be shame and is probably both.
The scar on her lower lip, pale against the bronze of her face.
The gold earrings catching the last of the afternoon light.
I want to touch her cheek.
The thought arrives without permission. It is not professional.
It is not strategic. It is the simple, animal recognition that the woman in front of me is showing me something genuine and my body's response is tenderness, and tenderness is not an emotion I have permitted myself in a professional context since before the yips, since before the collapse, since before I learned that caring about outcomes on a golf course can destroy you.
I do not touch her cheek.
"Trying is the minimum," I say. "I'm looking for commitment."
She nods. Once. The movement is small and precise and entirely unlike her.
"Thursday," I say. "Coastal event. South Carolina.
Heavy wind expected. I'll have the strategy ready by Tuesday.
When I present it, I need you to engage with it.
Challenge it. Tell me where you think I'm wrong.
But commit to the process before we reach the first tee, or tell me honestly that you can't."
"I can."
"We'll see."
I get in my car. I don't start the engine immediately. I sit behind the wheel and I allow myself ten seconds — ten, precisely counted — to feel what I have spent four hours suppressing.
My hands are on the steering wheel. I look at them. Long fingers. The scar on my right thumb from a broken glass twelve years ago. The faint lines of tendon visible beneath the skin.
Steady.
They are steady, and I wish they weren't, because trembling would be the honest physiological response to standing three feet from Tala Sarmiento while she dropped her armor in a parking lot and showed me the woman underneath, and my body's refusal to register the impact feels like its own kind of lie.
I tighten my grip on the wheel until my knuckles turn pale. Then I release. The blood returns. The warmth returns. I start the engine.
My phone is in the center console. I call Phaedra.
"How did it go?"
"She's a disaster."
Phaedra is quiet for a beat. She's reading the silence — the thing I'm not saying inside the thing I am.
"You're staying."
I pull out of the parking lot. The desert highway stretches ahead, flat and shimmering, and in my rearview mirror Tala Sarmiento is standing in the same spot I left her, watching my car leave.
"Obviously," I say.
I hang up. Drive. The course notebooks are in the back seat. Four of them filled with Tala's name.
In the yardage book, beneath the round's final score, I write:
Apology without deflection. No excuse offered. First instance of genuine accountability in the data I've collected. Requires follow-up.
Then, beneath that, smaller, in handwriting only I will ever read:
She looked at me like I was the first person who ever walked away and she wanted me to come back.
She was not wrong to want that.
I close the book and drive toward the hotel and I do not think about her hands at her sides, empty and open, for the remaining forty minutes of the journey.
I think about them for thirty-seven.