Chapter Fifteen
Sloane
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Being seen at that party cost me something I couldn't get back, and I knew it before I'd even finished walking out the door on Cade's arm with the whole kitchen watching.
It wasn't the team knowing. The team was a closed system; what they thought stayed in the building.
It was that the moment had happened in the world, in a house full of phones, and a thing that happens in a house full of phones is no longer a secret, it's just a fact that hasn't been published yet.
Somewhere in the days after, I knew, a screenshot or a story or a whisper was going to reach the wrong ear, and when it did, the relationship would stop being mine and start being evidence—of bias, of motive, of a girl who couldn't be trusted to tell the story straight.
I'd handed them the discrediting move. I'd done it myself, by being a person at a party for one hour like Brielle told me to, and I sat with that the whole week, the cold professional knowledge that I'd compromised my own work in the most visible way possible, and that the only thing I could do about it now was make the reporting so bulletproof that the bias accusation bounced off the facts.
So, again, I worked. It's the only prayer I know.
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I went after Wes Tanner that week.
I'd been circling him for a while—the trainer, the one whose name kept surfacing in the careful way people said it, the gap between what the staff knew and what they were allowed to write down.
Reyes had described him without naming him: the trainer who's not allowed to write 'can't play,' only 'limited.
' If the doctored reports were real, Wes was the man whose signature got overwritten.
He was a witness standing at the exact seam where the truth got changed into something else.
I didn't ambush him. You don't ambush a reluctant source; you make yourself a safe place for them to arrive at on their own.
I found out where he got his coffee. I sat near him, twice, and didn't say a word about football, just let him see my face become familiar.
The third time, I sat down across from him and said, quietly, "I'm not going to ask you anything.
I just want you to know that if you ever get tired of being the person who knows and isn't allowed to say, I'm easy to find, and I protect my sources with my whole life, and I think you became a trainer for a reason that this job has been making you betray. "
He went very still. He didn't confirm anything.
He didn't deny anything. He looked at me for a long moment with the face of a man carrying a weight he'd carried so long he'd forgotten it had an option of being set down, and then he said, "You should be careful, Ms. Pierce.
People who get close to this don't always—" He stopped.
Reconsidered. "Just be careful." And he got up and left.
It wasn't a yes. But it wasn't a no, and in this work, not a no from a man at the seam of the lie is its own kind of progress.
I went back to the office and wrote in my file: Tanner.
Close. Scared, but his fear is the conscience kind, not the complicit kind.
When the human cost gets bad enough, he'll talk. Don't push. Be there when it happens.
I just knew he was close, and I logged it, and I kept building.
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Mara pulled me aside Thursday.
"I'm hearing things," she said, in the tone she used when she'd decided to give me one chance to tell her before she made it a problem. "About my investigative reporter and a certain defensive back. From two different people now. You want to talk to me about that?"
My heart went sideways. This was the moment—the one I'd been dreading, the COI, the thing that could end my involvement in the story I'd bled for.
And I made a choice in that half-second that I've turned over a hundred times since, trying to decide if it was cowardice or strategy, and I still don't fully know.
I deflected.
"People love to make a story out of a guy walking a girl to her car," I said, light, the sunshine deployed.
"He got a creep off me at a party. That's the whole thing.
If I dated every player who was decent to me once, I'd never file.
" I held her eyes, steady, the way you hold a source's eyes when you're not lying exactly but you're not handing them the whole truth either.
"The reporting's clean, Mara. You've read every line.
Tell me where the bias is. Show me one fact I've shaded. "
She couldn't, because there wasn't one—I'd made sure of that, it was the whole point, the work was clean even if I wasn't—and she let it go, the way you let go of a thread you can't yet pull.
But she gave me a long look on the way out, the one that meant I'm filing this, and if it turns out to be more than a walk to a car, we're going to have a very different conversation.
I'd dodged it. I'd bought time. I'd also, I understood walking back to my desk, just done the exact thing I'd spent my whole life despising: I'd kept a secret from the person I owed the truth to, and I'd called it protecting the story.
Let's keep this between us. The sentence a man in a corner office said to my mother.
I'd just said a version of it to my editor, and I'd said it smoothly, and the smoothness was the part that scared me.
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He came over the night before the away trip, and I knew the second he walked in that he was carrying something.
I read people for a living. And Cade, for all his wall, was becoming an open book to me specifically—I'd learned his tells, the jaw, the way his shoulders sat when Voss had gotten to him, the particular flatness that meant he'd been threatened and decided to absorb it alone.
He had all of them that night. Something had happened. Someone had leaned on him.
"What did Voss say to you," I said. Not a question, really.
"Nothing." The flatness. "Just season stuff."
"Cade." I took his face in my hands, the jaw, the place I'd claimed.
"I heard the things you carry. I can feel one sitting on you right now.
You don't have to give me the whole thing.
But don't tell me it's nothing. I get enough nothing from the people I'm investigating. Don't make me investigate you too."
Something flickered across his face—the want to tell me, warring with the wall's oldest instruction, carry it alone, that's what you're for—and the wall won, the way it kept winning that week, and he kissed me instead of answering, gentle, deflecting, and I let him, because I was tired and in love and because I'd just dodged Mara the same way and didn't have the standing to demand a transparency I wasn't offering either.
We were both doing it, I realized later.
Both of us, that whole stretch, protecting each other by hiding things, each telling ourselves it was love.
Me with Mara, him with Voss. We'd built our whole careers on the principle that secrets are how they get you, that silence protects the powerful, and we'd come home each night and keep careful, loving, well-intentioned secrets from each other, brick by brick, and call it shelter.
The next morning the team bus left for the away game, and I drove the same direction in my own car, eleven hours up the interstate, with a notebook full of progress and a heart full of a man who was carrying something he wouldn't name—toward the first night we'd have with nothing between us, the secret we were each keeping riding along in the passenger seat, quiet, patient, waiting.
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