Chapter Twenty-Two
Cade
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I went back to my house after I left her and I did the only thing I knew how to do with a feeling that big, which is nothing.
I sat in the dark. I didn't drink, didn't call anyone, didn't sleep.
I just sat there being the wall, the way my father built me to, the way Voss had spent a night reinforcing, and I told myself it was working, that the cold was protection, that I'd done the right thing by refusing to watch her burn.
I told myself she was being reckless. I told myself I was being the adult, the one who could see the whole field, the one who knew what these men were capable of.
I built a whole courtroom in my head and I was the lawyer and the judge both, and I won every argument, and at the bottom of every won argument was a girl standing in a hallway with photographs around her feet, telling me I'd become the hand on the neck.
The problem with the wall is that it's load-bearing.
You can't put it up halfway. The same bricks that keep her words out keep everything else out too—including the part of me that knew she was right—and so I sat there numb and righteous and completely, monstrously wrong, and I'd have stayed wrong, I think.
I'd have driven all the way into the deal.
I'd have taken Voss's draft and his silence and his hand on my neck for the rest of my life and called it protecting her—
if Jaxon Holt hadn't been sitting on my front steps when the sun came up.
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Jaxon was the last person I expected. We weren't close.
He was the quarterback, the face, the golden one, polished and media-trained and always slightly somewhere else behind his eyes, and I was the enforcer, the silence, the guy you sent down a tunnel when a smile wouldn't do the job.
We'd shared a field for four years and maybe forty real sentences, most of them play calls.
He was sitting on my steps in yesterday's clothes with two gas station coffees, and he held one up when I opened the door, and he said, "I figured you wouldn't have slept.
I didn't either. Sit down, Lawson. I've been wanting to say something to you for about two years, and I think after yesterday I'm done being a coward about it. "
I sat down. I took the coffee. I had no idea what was happening, which was itself a strange feeling; I always knew what was happening, it was part of the job.
"You grabbed Voss yesterday," he said, looking out at the street, not at me, the way men like us can only say the real things, side by side instead of face to face.
"Picked him clean up off the ground in front of everybody.
And you know what I felt, watching three guys drag you off him?
" He turned and looked at me then, and the somewhere-else behind his eyes was gone, and what was underneath was exhausted and furious and twenty-two years old.
"Relief. I felt relief, Cade. Because for four years I've sat in that locker room being perfect and being terrified, and I thought I was the only one.
I thought everybody else actually believed it.
The family, the believe, the whole gospel.
I thought I was the only one who could see what it actually costs, and yesterday you picked Voss up off the ground over Theo's leg and I realized—" His voice caught.
"You see it too. You've always seen it. You just took it instead of saying it.
You ate it for four years so the rest of us wouldn't have to taste it. "
I didn't say anything. I couldn't. He kept going, because once a dam goes, it goes all at once.
"They told me I was concussed sophomore year and to keep it quiet because we had Halloran that week and I was the story," he said.
"I played. I don't remember the second half.
There's a whole half of a football game that is just gone out of my head, and I've got a thing now where stadium lights do something to me that I don't talk about.
They told me my dad would be so proud. That's how they did it—they didn't threaten me, they found the thing I wanted most, which was my father in the stands looking proud, and they made the silence the price of it.
For me it was being the golden one. For you it's the draft, the way out of wherever you're from.
For Theo it was proving he belonged. They custom-build the cage.
Different bars, same cage." He wrapped both hands around his coffee.
"Half the guys in that room have a version.
Marcus and the shoulder. Deon getting cleared three days after he couldn't remember the snap count.
The freshmen are already learning it—you're green or you're cut, don't get written down, walk it off before the building.
We all know, Cade. We've all known the whole time.
We just each think we're the only one, because the one rule, the only real rule in that building, is you don't say it out loud.
" He finally looked right at me. "And then a girl with a recorder showed up and started saying it out loud, and the only thing that's kept it from blowing wide open is that the one guy they trust to keep the room quiet—you—has been doing his job. "
The coffee had gone cold in my hand.
"I know about her," Jaxon said gently. "Everybody kind of knows, after the party.
I'm not—I don't care, man, good for you, she seems like she'd be genuinely terrifying to date and I mean that as the highest compliment.
" A ghost of a smile, gone fast. "I'm telling you all this because I think you're at the part where you decide something.
And I want you to know, before you decide, that you've got it backwards.
You think you're the wall holding the silence up.
You think if you talk, you're betraying the room, betraying the guys, betraying Theo even.
Cade. It's the opposite. You're not the wall.
You're the keystone. You're the one stone holding the whole arch up, and everybody under it is waiting—has been waiting for years—for you to be the one who moves, because the day you say it out loud, the room doesn't fall on you.
The room falls with you. There's a dozen of us behind you who've been waiting for one person to be willing to lose everything first, and we all assumed it'd have to be one of the loud ones, one of the guys with nothing to lose—and it turns out it was always going to have to be the quietest, hardest, most-trusted guy in the building.
Because you're the only one they can't call a liar.
You never say anything. The day you talk, nobody on earth can pretend it's a girl with a grudge. "
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I want to describe what that did to me, because I'd spent twenty-two years believing one thing, and Jaxon Holt broke it on my front steps with a gas station coffee in about eleven minutes.
I'd always thought the silence was mine.
My burden. My loyalty. The thing I carried so the people behind me didn't have to.
I'd thought of myself as the wall—alone, load-bearing, the last thing standing between the team and the hit, and there was a grim pride in it, the only pride I'd ever let myself have.
And he was telling me I'd had it exactly backwards.
That the silence wasn't protecting the room.
The silence was the room's prison, and I'd been the lock.
That every scared kid in that building was looking at the quietest, hardest, most trusted man on the roster, and as long as I kept my mouth shut, they all believed they had to keep theirs shut too.
My silence wasn't a shield over them. It was a ceiling.
And the day I spoke, I wouldn't be betraying them.
I'd be unlocking the door.
There's a thing Sloane said to me, weeks ago, in a stadium, before any of this started: Not talking about it isn't protecting Theo.
It's protecting whoever did it to him. I'd carried that around like a stone in my shoe ever since, and I'd let Voss talk me out of it in a single night across a desk with a folder of photographs and the word son.
And now Jaxon Holt was sitting on my steps saying the same thing in a different key, and between the two of them—the girl I'd just abandoned in a hallway and the quarterback I'd never really known—I felt the wall, for the first time in my life, start to come down on its own.
Not because someone tender pulled a brick out from the inside.
Because I was pushing. From in here. For the first time.
I stood up.
"Jaxon," I said, and my voice didn't sound like the wall and it didn't sound like my father and it didn't sound like Voss's son.
It sounded like the kid she kept telling me was right there the whole time.
"If I go first. If I say it out loud, on the record, with my name and my face on it. How many?"
He stood up too. He looked at me with four years of fear turning into something else right there in the morning light.
"More than you think," he said. "Way more.
Theo's already texting from the hospital asking who's in.
But you have to go first. That's the whole thing, man.
Somebody has to be willing to lose everything first, so the rest of us can afford to lose a little.
" He put his hand out. Not the back-of-the-neck hand.
The other kind. The kind between equals, the kind I'd been handed maybe twice in my life.
"Are you? Willing to lose everything first? "
And I almost said yes.
God, I almost said yes, right there, and if I had—if I'd shaken his hand and driven straight to Sloane's apartment and said light the match, name me first, I'll go on the record beside Theo and Jaxon and all of them, I'm so sorry, I was the wall, forgive me—everything that happened next would have been different.
There's a version of this where I'm not a coward for one more day, and that version has a lot less wreckage in it.
But I had Voss's deal in my pocket and my father's voice in my ear and a folder of photographs in my memory, and the wall, even coming down, even with me pushing, still had one move left in it. The oldest one. The one I hate myself for most, because it's the one that wears love's face:
If I go first, they run the photos. They end her. The deal is the only thing keeping her name clean. If I'm a hero, she's the girl who slept with a player to get her story. I can have the truth or I can protect her. Not both. So protect her. Stay quiet. It's the loving thing.
It was a lie. I know that now. It was the wall's last, best lie, the one dressed up as sacrifice, the one that let me keep being a coward and call it love.
I shook Jaxon's hand. I said, "Give me a day."
And then I did the second-worst thing I ever did, the thing that set up the worst: I drove not to Sloane, and not to Voss, but to nowhere, in circles, all day, around and around a town that suddenly felt very small, trying to find a version where I could keep her safe and keep my mouth shut and still be the man she'd made me, and there wasn't one, there was never one, it didn't exist on any road in that town—and while I drove in circles being a coward inside a nicer-shaped cage, Sloane Pierce sat in a newsroom with my editor and her conscience and started writing the truth without me.
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