Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Callie
I’m at my desk finishing a piece that was due yesterday, which is a generous description of what I’m doing, since what I’m actually doing is staring at six photographs of Nate Rivers for the third day running while a college coach’s biography sits half-written in another window.
The problem is sources. I have none. The two other men at the table aren’t famous, I’ve run their faces through everything I can access and the internet shrugs.
The woman is the same: pretty, anonymous, gone.
That leaves exactly two people who know what happened at that table, and they are Danny Alvarez and Nate Rivers.
Even in the fantasy version where either of them agrees to sit down with me, what’s the quote?
Yes, Ms. Carter, we were three bottles deep and the white powder was self-explanatory?
There is no version of this story that walks into my lap.
I’d have to go take it. And I keep… not.
“How’s the A a drip.
You ruined good people. I hope you’re proud.
My husband didn’t do anything and we lost everything.
I read two, which is my daily allowance, and close it.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about damages: they don’t discriminate.
And here’s the measurement I can’t stop taking: Callie from three years ago wouldn’t have blinked at these photos.
She’d have had the piece drafted in two hours and published by morning, chin up, byline proud.
Callie from three years ago believed the truth was a self-cleaning instrument.
This Callie has spent three days Googling nameless men and staring at a table.
“You should delete that folder.” Priya is suddenly at my shoulder, reading my screen, because privacy is a concept she files under fiction.
“It shouldn’t be this easy to ruin people’s lives,” I tell her.
“Babe, the only life you’re ruining is yours.
” She perches on my desk, relocating my stapler like she pays rent here.
“The staffers who got let go? Employed, all of them, I could pull their LinkedIns in ten minutes. Danny Alvarez has more career earnings than you and I will see in nine lifetimes. Everyone else caught up in it got traded or aged out, the way players do. The world moved on, Callie. You kept the folder.”
“You don’t know that they’re all fine.”
“And you don’t know that they’re not.” She shrugs, infuriatingly serene, and taps my screen, right on the photos. “Meanwhile, what does this one stand to lose? Reputation? A league fine? He’ll dry his tears with hundred-dollar bills and book another razor commercial.”
“Yeah? And what do I tell my kids?” It comes out harder than I intend, because this is the part that keeps me up at night.
“Everyone loves pointing out what a great bad-example he is. Eli hasn’t stopped talking about what a good coach he is.
Finn has shown that autograph to every human who holds still long enough.
There are a few million kids in this country exactly like mine, and one morning their parents are going to tell them to take the Nate Rivers posters down, and I’ll be the reason. Again.”
I’m not arguing with Priya. I’m arguing with myself, out loud, using her face. Because I genuinely don’t know what’s right, and it’s been three days, and I still can’t find the version of this where nobody small gets hurt.
“Callie.” Priya slides off my desk and looks at me straight, and her voice changes into the one she almost never uses, the one with no glitter on it. “I’m going to be honest with you, and I want you to take it the right way.”
Wonderful. One of these conversations.
“You have no self-esteem as a journalist. None. You wrote the best piece of investigative sports journalism this state has seen in a decade. You won an award for it, an actual award, which lives in a drawer because you can’t look at it.
And since then, what? Coach biographies.
Trade-rumor roundups. The Clements exposé.
” She lets that one drip with all the contempt it has earned.
“Every time a story gets real, you run. So here’s your redemption arc, sitting in your inbox in six photographs.
Write that the man’s a drug addict. Write that he isn’t.
I truly don’t care which. But there is a story there, and your problem is not sources, and it’s not witnesses, and it’s not whatever you tell yourself at red lights.
Your problem is that Callie Carter is afraid to write anything that matters. ”
“Don’t you have a wedding to cover?” I say, cold. “Or a divorce?”
It’s a cheap shot and it’s beneath me and I take it anyway, because she’s right, and we both know she’s right, and being seen that clearly feels like sunburn.
Priya just looks at me for a second, not hurt, cataloguing, and walks back to her desk without another word.
Which is worse than anything she could have said.
I pull Coach Clements back up and type like the keyboard owes me money.
And somewhere between his 2019 season and his quotes about culture, I make a decision I don’t fully admit until I’m already making it: I’m done working this story from a desk.
The story is on a youth field on the east side, twice a week, wearing a whistle and somebody else’s smile.
Eli has practice today. For once in my chronically late life, I am going to be early, set up in the bleachers like any other mom, and watch Nate Rivers pretend to be a person.
Let’s see how long the performance holds with a journalist at every practice.
It’s about the story. That’s the official record.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with proving Priya wrong.
#
Nate
I spent the morning at practice and the afternoon at a children’s hospital, smiling for cameras — PR material, social content, whatever it is Morrison feeds on.
Signed gear, took photos, met a seven-year-old named Ann who informed me my playoff interception last January was ‘bad.’ Everyone’s a critic. Went home.
And that’s when my day became alarming.
See, at the hospital I was in cargo pants and a team polo.
At home, I changed, and this is the alarming part, into athletic shorts, a dry-fit shirt, and running shoes.
Which is to say: I dressed like a coach.
Voluntarily. For the job I’m supposed to be slow-rolling into being politely fired.
I have excuses, and they’re excellent. It’s Texas; it’s ninety-four degrees; shorts are thermodynamics, not commitment.
The shoes are a safety matter. I am a professional athlete, and this is simply what one wears to a field.
I also arrived fifteen minutes early. My excuse: traffic is unpredictable, and I got lucky. Nobody needs to know I left early enough to get lucky.
The kids trickle in, and I end up helping a couple of them into their gear, shoulder pads are medieval technology when your arms are three feet long, and one of the two is Eli Carter.
“Where’s your mom?” I ask. Casually. Tactically.
Because since Grant connected the dots in the locker room, I’ve adopted a policy: I want to know where Callie Carter is at all times, and while she’s inside a hundred yards of me, I will be on the best behavior of my adult life.
I despise Morrison for the scheming, but the scheming doesn’t change the tactical picture.
That woman has an axe to grind with this organization, and a byline that’s already drawn franchise blood.
I’m not volunteering her material. She watches me; I watch her watching me.
It’s man coverage, is what it is, and I’ve read man coverage my whole career.
“She has to get Finn first. She’ll be here.”
He says it perfectly calm, buckling his chin strap, like it’s just the weather of his life, and the tone catches me somewhere I wasn’t expecting, because I know that tone.
I had that tone. Mom late for pickup, mom late for drop-off, mom sprinting from the first job to the second with my cleats in a grocery bag.
It was never her fault, I never once blamed her, and every ‘she’ll be here’ out of my mouth was a kid doing exactly what this kid is doing right now: packing the wait into two calm words so nobody worries about him.
The uncomfortable arithmetic assembles itself before I can stop it: Callie Carter may be a lot of things, most of them printable only in her own newspaper, but the woman is out in traffic right now making sure two boys are everywhere little boys are supposed to be.
My mother’s whole biography, set in a different font.
I hate it when facts do this.
“Why’d you decide to help our team?” Eli asks, out of nowhere, in that direct way of his, no angle, just the audit. “I’ve been here two years. Nobody ever came before. Just Coach Johnson and parent volunteers.”
“I was in a meeting, somebody suggested it, and I raised my hand.”