CHAPTER TEN
Nerys
I have lived in this house for six years, and in that time no one has entered it who was not delivering a package, repairing a fixture, or Phaedra.
This is by design. The house is the space I built after the divorce, after the collapse, after the two-year silence during which I did nothing except walk Charleston's waterfront at odd hours and read course maps for courses I would never play again.
I chose it for the marsh view and the morning light and the distance from anything that smelled like competition.
I furnished it with precision. Every object is placed.
Every room serves a function. Every surface is clean.
It is a house organized around the principle that if the external world is sufficiently controlled, the internal one can be managed.
Tala arrives at four in the afternoon on a Thursday, carrying a duffel bag and a paper bag from a bakery I've never visited because it's on King Street and King Street is for tourists and people who enjoy being near other people.
"I brought croissants," she says, standing on my porch.
"It's four PM."
"Croissants don't have a schedule. They're anarchists."
She steps inside.
I watch her the way I watch a player reading a course for the first time — the initial scan, the rapid assessment, the instinctive prioritization of what matters.
Tala's eyes move through my house with the same focused attention she brings to approach shots.
She catalogues the space in under thirty seconds.
She notices: the course maps framed on the hallway walls.
The clean lines of the living room. The absence of photographs — not a single one visible, not of me, not of tournaments, not of anyone.
The putting mat that occupies four feet of the living room floor.
The two separate offices visible through open doors — one with a desk and computer, one with a drafting table covered in course maps.
She walks through the hallway toward the back of the house and finds the club room.
I hear her stop.
The club room is the one space in this house where control is not an aesthetic choice but a necessity.
Fourteen club slots along the wall, each labeled.
Three sets of wedges organized by bounce angle.
Putter racks — four of them, because I own eleven putters and cannot bring myself to sell any despite the fact that holding them makes my hands remember things I have spent a decade trying to forget.
Shelving units with notebooks, organized by year and course.
A workbench for regripping. A small refrigerator for grip solvent that needs to remain at temperature.
And in the corner, a locked glass-front cabinet containing twelve trophies, three crystal bowls, and two major-championship plates.
Tala is standing in front of the cabinet when I reach the doorway.
"You keep them locked."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Because looking at them makes me feel the way I felt standing over the three-foot putt.
Because they represent a version of me that was destroyed on national television.
Because keeping them visible and unlocked would be like displaying a photograph of a dead lover in the bedroom where you sleep with someone new.
"They're from a different career," I say.
She nods. She doesn't push. She doesn't say you should be proud or you earned those or any of the well-meaning observations that people offer when confronted with a champion's trophies in a champion's locked cabinet.
She accepts the answer the way she's learning to accept a center-green target — without argument, because the reasoning is sound even if the instinct says otherwise.
Her eyes move to the shelf beside the cabinet. It's empty. Deliberately empty — a single shelf, dusted regularly, positioned at eye height, holding nothing.
"What's the empty shelf for?"
"I don't know yet."
She looks at me. I look at the shelf. Six years I've kept it there, and the honest answer to her question is that I installed it during the first week in this house because I believed, with the irrational certainty of a woman rebuilding herself from wreckage, that I would eventually find something worth placing on an empty shelf in a room full of locked achievements.
I didn't know what.
Standing in the doorway watching Tala Sarmiento examine my house with the same attention she gave my body in Singapore, I am beginning to suspect.
·
I cook dinner.
This is an activity I perform well and rarely — the kitchen is functional but largely ceremonial, because most evenings I eat simple meals standing at the counter while reviewing course data, and the idea of cooking for someone implies a domestic intimacy that I have not practiced since Saskia.
Tonight I make pasta. A simple cacio e pepe because it requires technique rather than ingredients — the emulsion of cheese and pasta water, the timing of the pepper, the wrist motion that brings the sauce together.
It's a dish that rewards patience and punishes rushing, which feels thematically appropriate given the woman sitting at my kitchen island watching me work.
Tala is perched on a stool with her bare feet hooked around the legs, wearing a white T-shirt and loose shorts, her hair still damp from the shower she took after I gave her a towel and pointed at the guest bathroom and she said "guest bathroom?
" with an expression that made clear she had opinions about the word guest that she was choosing not to voice.
She's watching my hands.
I can feel the observation. It has a specific weight — not the clinical attention of a physical therapist or the morbid curiosity of someone remembering the clip. She watches my hands the way she watches the flight of a ball she's struck well. With satisfaction. With ownership.
"What?" I say, grating Pecorino.
"Your hands. I keep thinking about them."
"Most people think about them because of the clip. The six putts."
"I think about them because of what they did to me in Singapore."
I set down the grater. Turn.
She's looking at me from the kitchen island with the direct, unfiltered honesty that I am learning is not performance.
Tala performs many things — confidence, indifference, ease.
But when she says something that costs her, the performance drops and what remains is a woman who means exactly what she's said and is prepared to defend it.
"I'm falling in love with you."
The sentence enters the kitchen like a change in air pressure. I feel it in my chest before I process the words.
"I know it's been three weeks," she continues. "I know Keoni told you I'm impressive for about three weeks and then the patterns come back. I know you're counting the days, waiting for me to prove him right."
"I'm not waiting for you to fail."
"What are you waiting for?"
The question is precise. It is also a trap — not a malicious one, but the kind of trap that demands honesty because any lesser response will be immediately identified as evasion.
"For the version of you that stays after the excitement fades," I say.
"The version that listens when we've been together long enough that my advice feels routine instead of novel.
The version that disagrees with me at tournament six the same way she disagrees at tournament two — with respect rather than contempt. "
Tala absorbs this. She doesn't flinch. She doesn't argue.
"That's fair."
"It's cautious."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." She picks up a piece of Pecorino from the cutting board and eats it. "I know my reputation. I know what Keoni told you. He's not wrong — historically. The pattern is real. I get something I want and I stop wanting it and I move to the next thing."
"And this is different because?"
"Because the wanting isn't going away." She looks at me.
Gold-brown eyes, steady, unperforming. "Usually by now I've started cataloguing exit routes.
What will I say when it ends? How will I frame the breakup?
What story will I tell Bisi? I'm always building the departure before the arrival is complete. "
"And now?"
"Now I'm sitting in your kitchen watching you make pasta and I'm not thinking about how to leave. I'm thinking about what this kitchen looks like at Christmas."
The pasta water is boiling. I should attend to it. The timing of cacio e pepe is unforgiving — the cheese must meet the water at the right temperature or it seizes, and I've never served a seized sauce to anyone and I don't intend to start.
I turn back to the stove. Drain the pasta.
Reserve the water. Begin the emulsion. My hands work — tossing, adding water, folding cheese into the hot starch — and they're steady and precise and I am making dinner for a woman who just told me she's falling in love with me and I am responding by perfecting a sauce because the alternative is responding with words, and the words I have are too large for this kitchen.
We eat at the table. I set two places, which requires retrieving a second placemat from a drawer I haven't opened in months.
Tala sits across from me. The marsh light through the windows turns the room amber.
The pasta is good. The wine is a white Burgundy I've been saving for an occasion I couldn't define until now.
"Tell me about Wales," she says.
I tell her. Not everything — not yet. But I tell her about the courses outside Aberystwyth, the ones my father mapped with a surveyor's obsessive love.
How he'd take me walking before dawn, barefoot, so I could feel the slopes through my feet rather than reading them with my eyes.
How he believed that a golfer who couldn't feel the ground was playing a different game than the one the course was offering.
"He taught you to read terrain by feel."
"He taught me that information arrives through the body before the mind catches up. The feet know the slope before the eyes see it. The hands know the wind before the instruments measure it."