He Called It A Mistake (Grovel & Grace #8)

Chapter 1

one

PHOEBE

Colby makes a noise before dawn that isn’t exactly crying and isn’t quite talking. It’s more like conversational grumbling, reminding me of my father when he gets stuck in line at the bank.

I’ve learned to wake up on the first one. Troy sleeps through every single one, and I’ve never taken it personally, because the man slept through an earthquake and a smoke alarm in the same week back when we were still renting.

I got him up before the grumbling could turn into actual crying, and took him out to the deck, and we watched the water go from grey to green to blue while the sun came up behind the house.

He’s four months old. He’s got his father’s eyelashes and my dimples. I’d consider that theft, but in the best kind of way.

Here’s what nobody tells you about having a body that used to be a professional instrument.

It still is one.

Everybody wants to hand you a soft story about being broken and remade after motherhood.

It isn’t that at all. Yes, I carried a baby and I delivered a baby and my abdominal wall has opinions about it, but underneath all of that’s seventeen years of conditioning that hasn’t gone anywhere.

My legs are my legs. My shoulders are my shoulders.

I can still hold a plank until Marta gets uncomfortable and leaves the room—though maybe I’m not supposed to be going quite so hard with the ab workouts just yet.

What I can’t do is go up on my toes and change direction, because there’s a small structural argument happening across my middle that has to finish before I ask it for anything sudden.

So I do what I was taught to do with an injury. Work everything that isn’t hurt. Wait, without drama, for the part that is.

For some reason, people find this upsetting. I’ve been asked more than once whether I’m being kind to myself. Am I giving myself space to recuperate? Do I need to re-center myself? It’s like the moment I became a mother, I was only that, and nothing that came before that seemed to exist.

The truth is that yes, I’m being extremely kind to myself. I’m also being accurate with my expectations. Nobody has ever explained to me why those two things clash.

Marta came early, took one look at me, and put the kettle on before she took her coat off.

She’s a Swedish woman who’s about a foot taller than me, which is saying something, and her first instinct is to always put tea on, even though this is Malibu and we’re not exactly stranded in the Scandinavian winter.

“You were up before it was light.”

“Ten to five.”

“Phoebe.”

“What? He was talking. It was a whole speech. You’d have gotten up too.”

Marta’s been with us since Colby was three weeks old, and neither of us can take credit for her.

Francis found her, and it’s the single best favor my mother-in-law has ever done me.

She’s fifty-one, she raised three of her own, and she has an unbothered competence I recognize from every good coach I’ve ever had.

She doesn’t perform enthusiasm about my son.

She just handles him correctly and he goes quiet, and I’ve watched her do it a bunch of times and I’m no closer to working out the mechanism than when I first witnessed it.

“Go and swim,” she said. “I’ve got him.”

“I’m really okay, you know.”

“Of course. I said go and swim.”

My father called while I was drying my hair, on video, the way he has done every morning since Colby was born, not bothering to ask about me at all.

“Turn it around.”

“Hello to you too, Dad.”

“Phoebe, sweetheart! Love you! Now turn it around.”

With a sigh, I propped my father on the counter facing my son.

Leon Powers, who coached me for seventeen years and never told me I’d played well when I hadn’t, sat in his kitchen in Encino talking absolute nonsense to his grandson while I was busy reading through the latest scores at the US Open’s week 1 matches.

My dad’s better at being a grandfather than he ever was at being a coach, but I don’t say that to him. He’d hear it wrong.

Troy came down in a shirt that I’d begged him to buy when I saw the shade of blue match his eyes, already on the phone, and did what he does, which is mouth I love you across a room while telling his manager he’s absolutely on his way.

At thirty-eight, it’s not only my opinion that he’s better looking than he was at twenty-one. It’s unfair and he knows it. He kissed the top of Colby’s head, then the back of my neck, then Colby’s head again on the way past.

“Say it back,” he said, hand over the phone.

“You’re on a call.”

“Jeremy will hold. Jeremy exists to hold. Say it back.”

“I love you. Get to work or Jeremy will be on hold forever.”

“That was rushed,” he said, a quiet whine in his voice. He gave me the look he saves for whenever he’s trying to get his way with me. It works half the time, at least.

“I love you very much and you are going to be late and Jeremy is going to cry.”

And he grinned at me, all of it, the one they put on posters, and he was gone.

Troy isn’t the problem. Whatever else happens in this house, my husband has never been the problem.

Zoe came for lunch and brought a salad she didn’t make and announced it was homemade with the receipt still in the bag.

She’s my cousin and the only person alive who still talks to me the way people did before. Everybody else has developed a voice. It’s slightly slower and slightly warmer and it has a hand on my arm in it, like I’m something to be handled.

Two women at the next table had recognized me and were working out whether to come over.

I could have told you which one would do it and how long she’d take.

The taller one was the talker but she was waiting to be given permission, and the small one hadn’t looked at me once, which meant she was the one who’d decide.

That’s the part that doesn’t retire along with you. Everybody thinks you lose the legs, the discipline, the skills. But you don’t… not really. You just stop being paid for it, and then one day you’re at lunch, working out which of two strangers is going to break first, for no reason at all.

The small one came over. It took her about a minute and a half.

She was lovely. They almost always are. She said her daughter had my poster on a wall for six years and had cried at the retirement press conference, and I said thank you, because her daughter cried and that’s worth being thanked for.

And then she put her hand on my arm and did the voice.

“You must miss it so much.”

“I really don’t,” I said, as plainly as I could without coming off as a total bitch. Because that can sometimes happen, too.

She smiled at me with enormous sympathy, the way you smile at somebody being brave, and went back to her table to tell her friend how well I was doing.

Zoe waited until I was back to normal. “You look good, Phoebs.”

I rolled my eyes. “I look tired.”

“You look tired and good.” She opened her salad, carefully tossing the packaged dressing into it with her fork. “So. Do you want the actual news or the fake news first?”

“Fake.” We play this game every time we meet for lunch.

“Somebody at the club told me you were pregnant again.”

“I have a four-month-old,” I grumbled, poking around at my own cream cheese bagel.

“I know. I said that. She said, well, they do sometimes.”

And then she slid her phone across the table with the real news on it, and I read it twice, and I put it face down.

The Women’s Cancer Organization does a celebrity exhibition every year. There’s a big stadium, live broadcast, everybody in white, and a lot of money raised in one afternoon by people who are busy pretending to play badly and mostly failing to pretend.

They want me. And worst of all… they want me against Edwardo Sartori.

And unfortunately, they’d already written the copy. That was the part that got me. It was right there in the email Zoe had been forwarded by somebody who knew somebody.

‘Former world number one Phoebe Powers returns to the court.’

Former.

Not retired. Not champion. Not Phoebe Powers, who won everything there was to win and then stopped on purpose at the exact moment she chose. Former.

I’ve been out of the game for two years and I’ve made peace with every single part of it. Nobody believes that. And the word still went into me the way a splinter goes into a hand.

“Well?” Zoe said.

“Not happening.”

“Phoebe!”

“It’s a no. It’s a nice no. I’ll write them a lovely note.”

“You didn’t even?—”

“Zo.” I turned the phone back over and pushed it across to her. “What do you think that afternoon looks like? I turn up, I’m gracious, I lose in straight sets in a stadium to a man I used to beat, and every single person watching gets to feel warm about how well I’m handling it.”

“You wouldn’t lose.”

“I would absolutely lose. I can’t change direction yet. And Edwardo has been training with that guy. The one who pushed David Marten and the Williams sisters when they were in-between.”

“First of all, so what? Who says you’ll lose to him? And if you do, then you’d lose,” my cousin said, “on television, for charity, and it’d still be the biggest audience they’ve ever pulled.”

That was true. It was also exactly the problem. I said no again and we ate our food.

Troy got home late and came straight up to the nursery, still in the shirt, and stood in the door watching me put our son down for what would probably end up being more of a nap than anything.

He does that. It’s been four months and he still stops in doorways to look at us like he can’t believe the room came with both of us in it.

“Good day?” he asked.

I wanted to tell him. ‘Yes, sweetheart. They asked me to play the Women’s Cancer exhibition against Sartori and I told them no and I’d like to talk about why.’

But I didn’t.

“Quiet day,” I said. “Marta got him down for two hours.”

“Two? That’s a personal best.”

“That’s what I said.”

He laughed. He put his arms around me from behind and his chin on my shoulder, and we stood in the dark looking at the baby.

I still couldn’t tell you exactly why I didn’t tell him, except that I already knew what his face would do. He’d be delighted. He’d be so completely, generously delighted for me.

And I didn’t want to be delighted for.