Chapter Nine
Sloane
?
It took me nine days to find Dominic Reyes, and when I did, he was stocking shelves at a hardware store two hundred miles north, in the town he'd grown up in, the one he'd left at eighteen on a full ride to be somebody and come back to at twenty to be a man who knew where the drywall screws were.
Nine days of dead ends. A phone number that rang to a stranger.
A cousin on social media who'd blocked me the second I said the word reporter.
A coach at his old high school who'd gotten very quiet, very fast, and said that family's been through enough, leave it, which told me more than an interview would have.
People kept warning me off Dominic Reyes the way you warn a kid off a stove, and every warning was another degree of heat confirming there was a fire.
I got him in the end through the most boring door there is: a public business listing, an employee directory, a store landline answered by a manager who handed off the phone before I could be stopped.
And then there was a click, and a wary breath, and a low careful voice that I'd come to recognize as its own dialect—the voice of men who'd been taught their words had a price.
"I can't talk to you." That was the first thing he said. Not who is this. He already knew. He'd been waiting for this call for two years, the way you wait for a diagnosis you've already half made yourself. "I signed a thing. I literally can't. That's the whole point of the thing."
"I know about the thing," I said, which was a bluff dressed as a fact, my specialty.
"I know you signed it in an office with the door closed.
I know they made it feel like they were helping you.
I'm not going to ask you to break it, Dominic.
I'm not going to print your name. I just want to understand the shape of it, off the record, so I can find the version of this story that doesn't need you to be the one who tells it. "
Silence on the line. A loudspeaker in the background paging somebody to register four. The sound of a normal life he was supposed to be grateful for.
"How'd you even find me," he said.
"You played special teams against Halloran three years ago and made a tackle on a kick return that somebody's dad filmed from the stands and posted with your name in the caption. You exist, Dominic. They can scrub a website. They can't unmake a Tuesday."
He laughed, just once, surprised out of him, the laugh of a man who hadn't been seen in a while.
And then he talked. Not all of it. Never the thing he signed, by name, never the number on the check—he was too scared and too smart and too honorable, which was its own kind of heartbreak, a man protecting the people who'd ruined him because he'd promised.
But he gave me the shape. He gave me the afternoons.
"It's never one big thing," he said. "That's what nobody gets.
People hear 'pressured to play hurt' and they picture some movie coach screaming play or you're cut.
It's never that. It's a hundred small ones.
It's the trainer who's not allowed to write can't play, only limited.
It's the way the team doctor works for the team and not for you, and you don't figure out what that means until it's too late.
It's Voss putting his hand on the back of your neck and calling you son and telling you the team needs you and you're tougher than this and the scouts are watching—and you're nineteen, and he's the first man who ever made you feel chosen, so you go back in.
You'd go back in a hundred times. You'd go back in on a broken neck because the alternative is the look on his face when you say no, and you've already arranged your whole heart around that look not happening. "
I had my recorder going. I also had, somewhere behind my sternum, the specific ache of a story that's bigger and worse than you hoped, which is a thing you should never feel good about and which I felt good about anyway, and which is the part of this job I'll answer for someday.
"And then one day," Reyes said, quieter, "your shoulder's gone for real.
Not tweaked. Gone. And the same man who called you son three weeks ago is real busy all of a sudden, doesn't have time, and instead there's a guy named Mercer scheduling you a meeting.
And you go to the meeting, and the door closes—it's always the same office, you find out later everybody went to the same office—and there's a man in a suit you've never met before, and he's so kind about it, Sloane, that's the part that took me a year to understand.
He's so kind. He's sad for you. And there's a piece of paper.
And he explains, very gently, that your medical scholarship is complicated.
That there's 'questions' about whether the injury was 'pre-existing.
' That it could get 'adversarial,' and you don't want adversarial, do you, not with everything you've got going on, your mom and all.
And wouldn't it be better for everybody if you just took the hardship withdrawal, and a little help getting started somewhere new, and closed the chapter with some grace.
" His voice had gone rough. "They love that word.
Grace. And you sign. Because you're twenty and you're hurt and you're scared and the alternative is a fight with men who have lawyers on retainer and a billboard on the interstate.
And here's the worst part. Here's the part I still can't—"
He stopped. I waited. You always wait.
"You sign it grateful," he said. "They make you grateful for the knife.
I drove home that day thanking God it wasn't worse.
I thanked them. I sent Voss a text saying thank you for everything coach.
It took me a year to get angry, and by then there was nothing to be angry at, because I'd signed a piece of paper that said none of it happened. "
The hardware store loudspeaker paged somebody again. A normal Tuesday, two hundred miles away, where a man who used to be fast restocked the drywall screws.
"Dominic," I said. "There's a kid still in it. Linebacker. Theo Brooks. He's hurt and they're running him, and I think the meeting's coming for him too."
The line went quiet for a long time.
"Yeah," he said finally. "I figured there would be.
There's always one. There was one before me, you know—older guy, I never even knew his name, just heard the way the staff talked around it.
It's a machine, Sloane. It's been running longer than any of us were here and it'll be running after.
You don't expose a person. There's no villain twirling a mustache.
You have to expose the machine." A breath.
"Tell the kid—" He stopped. "No. Don't tell him anything.
He won't listen. I wouldn't have. Just—get it right, okay?
If you're going to do this, get it right enough that nobody can make you sign anything to take it back.
Get it so right it can't be a girl with a grudge.
Because that's the only thing they've got left when the facts are true.
They make it about the person who said it. "
He hung up before I could promise him I would.
I sat in my car in the Review parking lot for twenty minutes not writing a word, which for me is the equivalent of a seizure.
The recording sat on my phone, three minutes and forty seconds of a ruined man being decent, and I couldn't bring myself to transcribe it yet, because transcribing it would make it a quote, a thing in a file, and right then it was still just a person.
Then I did the one thing I absolutely should not have done.
I texted Cade.
I need to see you. Not the story. I just— I need to see you.
The dots came up. Disappeared. Came up.
Where.
My place. Brielle's out. Please.
20 min.
?
He came because Brielle was at her boyfriend's, and because we were already so far past every line that the lines had stopped being visible, and because I'd asked.
I told him about Reyes before he was all the way in the door.
I couldn't not. It came out of me in a flood—the hardware store and the afternoons and the man in the suit who was so kind and they make you grateful for the knife—and I watched it land on him, and I watched his face do something I'd never seen it do.
He went pale.
"You called Reyes." It wasn't a question. His voice had gone very flat and very quiet, the dangerous quiet, the one from the tunnel, except now I knew him well enough to know that the danger in it wasn't aimed at me. "You found Dom and you called him."
"He didn't give me his name on the record, Cade, I protected—"
"That's not—" He pushed both hands into his hair and turned away from me, and his back, I'd notice later, moved wrong when he did it.
"Sloane. Mercer is photographing everyone you talk to.
I watched him do it Saturday. If they find out you got to Reyes—if they find out Reyes talked—they will not send a guy with a phone.
Do you understand? They will not send Dale Mercer to take your picture in a parking lot.
There is real money in this. There are men who gave this program more than your whole family will ever see, and they did not give it to watch a junior with a recorder set it on fire.
" He turned back and his eyes were wild, wide, the careful nothing nowhere in sight.
"Reyes is in another state and they can still reach him.
You're across campus. If something happened to you because you got close to this, I can't—I can't, Sloane, I can't be the wall on that one, there's no version of me that survives that—"
"So this is about protecting the story," I said. "The team. Voss's—"