Chapter Four
Cade
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Miles slid the phone across the kitchen island at seven in the morning like he was passing me a sentence.
"So I did the thing," he said. "The Sloane thing. And I want it noted, for the record, in front of God and this very sad bowl of cereal, that I have concerns."
I didn't pick it up. "What concerns."
"My main one is that you asked." He hopped up onto the counter, which I'd told him forty times not to do.
"My second one is what I found. Which is that she's not, like, a content creator who wandered into a stadium for the vibes.
Cade. She's good." He started ticking it off on his fingers.
"Piece last spring on the housing office burying mold complaints.
Got a maintenance director fired. Real fired.
Before that, a thing about the meal-plan contract that the actual town newspaper picked up and credited her on.
As a sophomore." A beat. "And before that—freshman year—there's a piece with her name on the byline.
But if you read the corrections page two weeks later, somebody else's name got added on top of hers, and hers got moved down to 'contributing.
' Editor took it. Older guy. He's at a real paper now.
Won an award with it." Miles looked at me. "Her award."
I picked up the phone then.
I don't know why that was the part. I'd been braced for the rest of it—competent, dangerous, exactly the kind of person you can't buy or scare.
Voss already knew that; it was the whole reason I'd been sent down a tunnel.
That part was a problem I understood. You handle a smart reporter the way you handle a smart back: you don't out-think them, you just make the cost of the route too high.
The byline was different.
The byline was a girl who'd done the work—found the thing, chased the thing, written the thing—and then watched a powerful man she trusted put his name on top of hers and move her down the page. And had decided, somewhere in there, that she was never going to be moved down a page again.
It was the reason for the smile. The armor over the armor. You don't fight that hard to be the one who says the thing out loud unless somebody once made it very clear your saying it didn't count.
I knew that girl. I'd never met her—I'd met the version with the recorder and the sunshine—but I knew the one underneath, the way you recognize your own injury in somebody else's walk.
Somebody taught her young that the realest part of her was the most expendable.
Somebody taught me the same thing. We'd just built opposite armor out of it.
She got loud, so nobody could move her down the page.
I got quiet, so nobody could find the page at all.
"You okay?" Miles asked, quieter, watching me the way he watched me before games. "You've got the face. Not the killer one. The other one. The one you had when your grandma—"
"I'm fine."
"That's literally the team motto, and it's never once been true for anyone who said it." He slid off the counter, abandoning the cereal. "Where'd you get all this in twelve hours, anyway?"
"My girl Priya's a copy editor at the Review.
" He brightened, the chaos flooding back in like a tide.
"Which—side note—means I now have a source on the inside, which is very cool and spy of me, and which I will absolutely use for good and not to find out if Sloane Pierce thinks you're hot.
Even though Priya says the energy when your name came up was, quote, 'a lot,' end quote—"
"Miles."
"—she didn't say anything specific, it's a vibe, a documented vibe—"
"Miles."
He shut up. Mostly. Then, gentler, the clown packing itself away the way it could when it mattered: "Just. Whatever this is.
Be careful, man. Voss has got that look about the season.
The clenchy one. And you're the guy he leans on when he needs the room to stay quiet about something.
" He picked his backpack up off the floor.
"I've never loved you being the guy he leans on.
Not once in four years. You're better than the job he gives you—and I think the reason you can't see it is you've been doing the job since before you got here. "
He left for class before I could decide whether to be angry about that.
I wasn't angry about it. That was the problem with Miles. He aimed for the soft spot every time, and never once seemed to be trying.
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I found out she'd met Theo because Theo told me.
That's the part that still gets me, looking back.
He didn't hide it. He came to my place that afternoon, let himself in with the key I'd given him sophomore year, got a Gatorade out of my fridge, and lowered himself onto my couch with his bad leg up on my coffee table—the careful way he did everything now, the way that told you more than he'd ever say.
"I talked to that reporter," he said.
The whole inside of me went cold and flat. Game-speed. The way it does before contact.
"You did what."
"Coffee. Off campus, the place that isn't on the quad.
Off the record." He wasn't looking at me.
He was looking at the Gatorade, turning it in his hands.
"She didn't push. That's the thing, Cade.
She didn't even ask me anything, really.
She just—asked how I was. Like, actually.
Sat there for an hour and asked how I was and then listened, and I—" His voice did something.
Theo's voice never did anything; he was the only person on the team quieter than me, which is saying a thing.
"I almost told her, man. The whole— I almost told her everything.
About the leg. About what Wes said off the record before they told him to change it. About Reyes."
"You said his name to her?"
"No." Quick. "No. I didn't give her anything.
I swear. I caught it." He finally looked up, and he had the same look he'd had on the bench—the still one, the one I let live because looking at it too hard meant I'd have to do something about it.
"But I wanted to. That's what scared me bad enough to come over here.
I've been carrying this so long I almost handed it to a stranger in a coffee shop, because she made it feel like I was allowed to put it down.
Like it wasn't disloyal. Like the disloyal thing was them.
Not me." He set the Gatorade down. "When's the last time anybody made you feel like that, Cade? Like you were allowed to put it down?"
I didn't answer. He knew the answer.
The answer was never.
"Where is she now," I said.
"Cade—"
"Where, Theo."
"She said she was going to walk back through the north lot after.
Look at the—I don't know, man, she said something about the old practice field.
The one they fenced off before they built the new place.
" He pushed himself up off the couch, wincing, hating that he'd told me, hating more that he understood exactly why I was asking.
"Don't do the thing where you go scare her quiet for me.
I'm asking you. I don't want that. I'm so tired of people deciding what's good for me by deciding what I'm allowed to say.
That's their move, Cade. Voss's move. Don't make it yours. "
That should have stopped me.
I want to be honest in this, even the parts that don't make me look like anything. It didn't stop me.
I told myself I was going to do exactly what Voss wanted and exactly what Theo had just begged me not to—go make her stop.
I got in my truck. And the whole drive across campus I rehearsed it: the warning, the wall, the cold flat voice.
And the whole drive I knew, underneath, that I was lying to myself about which thing I was driving toward.
The old practice field sat behind a chain-link fence at the edge of campus.
The place they used to break boys before they built somewhere with better lighting to do it.
Weeds coming up through the hash marks. A set of bleachers rusting quietly into the ground.
The ghost of a place where men used to get hurt, abandoned now that the hurting had been moved indoors and given a budget.
She was at the fence, fingers hooked through the links, looking at nothing. An empty field. The dark coming on.
She heard me coming. Of course she did. She heard everything.
"Let me guess," she said, without turning around. "There's nothing out here for me to write about."
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"You met with Theo." My voice came out wrong. Lower than I meant. "After I told you not to go near him."
"You didn't tell me anything." She turned, her back to the fence now, chin up, that ready brightness in her face.
But there was something underneath it tonight, the light going gold and long behind her, that wasn't performance.
"You told me to go look at the crab cakes.
Theo asked me. There's a difference, and the difference is whether he's a person or a thing you're guarding. "
"He's my—" I stopped. The word brother sat in my mouth and I couldn't get it past the place where words went to die. "You don't get to use him. Whatever you're building, whatever clip you need to get out of this dump and into wherever you're going—you don't get to build it out of him."
"I'm not building anything out of him." She pushed off the fence and came toward me.
Which nobody did. People backed up when I lowered my voice; they'd been backing up from me since I was fourteen.
And she came forward, and I had the disorienting experience of being approached by the exact thing I'd spent four years being.
"I bought him a coffee and I asked how he was and then I listened, which is apparently so foreign in that boy's life that it nearly broke him.
And you should ask yourself why that is, Cade.
Why the kindest thing that happened to your friend this month was a stranger acting like his pain was real. "
"Don't." It came out cracked. "Don't tell me about his pain. I've carried his pain since we were eighteen—"
"I know." She stopped close. Closer than the tunnel.
Close enough that I could see she wasn't winning this either—that whatever was happening to me was happening to her too, that her hands weren't entirely steady where they'd come up between us.
"That's the whole problem, isn't it. You've been carrying everybody's.
Theo's, the team's, whoever Reyes was—don't, I saw your face, I'm not writing it down, the recorder's in my bag, this is just us—and I'd bet everything I own that nobody has ever once, in your entire life, asked to carry yours.
" Her voice dropped. "I bet you wouldn't even know how to hand it over. I bet if somebody tried, you'd flinch."
"Stop."
"Who taught you that," she said. Softer. Relentless. The gold light on her face. "That needing something makes you weak. Because somebody did. You don't get this quiet by accident. Somebody trained it into you—the way you train a dog not to flinch at a raised hand by raising it enough times."
The field was empty. The light was nearly gone.
Somewhere far off a sprinkler ticked on, that small ordinary domestic sound, and I was standing in a dead place I'd come to be alone with the one person who'd looked at me and seen the alone underneath the wall.
Her mouth was right there. She'd stopped talking, which she never did.
And I understood with total clarity that I was about to ruin my entire life, and that the ruin was going to feel like setting something down.
I got one hand up. Not to push her away.
The other thing.
My thumb found the line of her jaw—that same place I watched clench on my own face every day—and she made the smallest sound, barely a breath, and her eyes went dark and her hand fisted in the front of my shirt. Not pushing.
Pulling.
And my phone went off in my pocket. Voss's tone. The one I'd set special so I'd never miss it. So I'd always come when called.
We sprang apart like the fence had gone live.
She got her breath first—she always got her breath first—and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth like she could put the almost back, and gave a laugh that didn't have any floor under it.
"That's—" She swallowed. "That's your master's voice, isn't it.
The special ringtone." Her eyes, when they came up, weren't unkind.
They were worse than unkind. They understood.
"He's got you trained to come when he calls, and you don't even hear the leash anymore.
You just feel the pull and call it loyalty. "
"Sloane—"
"It's fine." It wasn't. "Go. Answer it. That's the thing you're good at.
" She was already backing toward the lot, pulling her armor on in real time, and I watched her do it and recognized every piece, because I had the same set.
"And Cade? For what it's worth?" The smile she gave me had a crack right through the middle of it.
"That almost-nothing that almost-happened just now?
That's the most honest you've been with me since the tunnel.
You should try it sometime without the field being empty.
See who you are when there's a witness."
She walked away.
I answered the phone, because she was right, because I always did.
"Twenty-seven." Voss, warm in my ear. The billboard voice. The hand on the neck made of sound. "Tell me you've got that reporter situation handled."
I looked at the place where she'd been standing. At the dead field going dark. At the print of her hand still pressed into the front of my shirt, where she'd pulled me toward the worst, best decision I'd never quite made.
"Handled," I said.
It was the first time I lied to him.
It would not be the last.
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