Chapter 10 #3
Callie: You want to come to the Ledger. Inside the building.
Me: Hell no. I’ll park a block away and you’ll sneak out like a teenager breaking curfew. I’m dead serious.
Callie: Fine. But you’re bringing the tacos, on account of me being always late.
Me: So you’re just using me for my credit card.
Callie: Send me your Venmo and I’ll reimburse you, big spender.
Me: I was joking. I can probably absorb the tacos. Probably.
“Who are you texting?” Grant kicks my shin under the desk.
“No one.” I angle the phone away, still trying to read her reply, which is my first tactical error.
“No one, my ass. Everyone you know is in this room.” He makes a grab for the phone; I swing it to my other side, second tactical error, where Holden plucks it out of my hand like a man picking fruit. The phone buzzes in his grip. Locked, thank God. But the banner shows the name.
“Callie Carter?” Holden says it out loud, and not quietly, because Holden has never once done anything quietly when it comes to embarrassing someone.
At the front of the room, Coach clears his throat without turning around. “If you three don’t shut up, you’ll be sharing it with the class.”
I pry my phone out of Holden’s dead-man grip. “It’s Little League logistics,” I say, quietly, eyes forward, to the room’s most bulletproof half-truth.
Holden shrugs and returns to the film. Grant doesn’t. Grant keeps looking at me for one long beat with an expression I know from third-and-long: concern, a little disapproval, and the unspoken assessment I can’t decide if you’re insane or stupid. Probably both, buddy. Probably both.
After film I don’t linger, because I know exactly which lecture is queued up, the she-will-end-you speech, Grant’s remix, and I already held that hearing days ago, internally, and the kiss won on points.
Instead I do something I’ve never done since the day the man was hired.
I walk into David Morrison’s office voluntarily.
“What have you done?” Morrison looks up from his laptop with the wariness of a man whose job is other people’s mistakes.
“Me? Nothing.” I take the chair across the desk without being offered it. “This is about you. Did you put me on that specific youth team because Callie Carter’s kid plays on it?”
The theory Grant and I assembled weeks ago. Time to test it against the primary source, and hope the snake doesn’t bother lying.
“Yes.”
He doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t blink. Says it the way other men say the time.
“Why?” Because it’s insane. “You told me you didn’t know who had the pictures, if anyone. You think she does?”
“Honestly? I don’t know.” He shrugs, immaculate.
“But here’s the arithmetic. There are fewer than five outlets, nationally and locally combined, that I know for a fact I cannot influence.
Anyone else gets those photos, I get a heads-up call first. I buy someone a very nice steak.
I put them in a box for a game, give them an experience, walk them through context.
They still run the story, but I hold the pen on the narrative.
Callie Carter, I cannot influence. No steak, no box, no pen.
So the play was simple: you, twice a week, charm and smiles, sign a jersey for the kid, and if the photos ever land on her desk, somewhere in her gut is a voice saying that Nate guy was decent to my son, maybe there’s more to it.
Cheap insurance.” He steeples his fingers.
“Please tell me she doesn’t still hate you. It’s been weeks.”
“She hates my guts.”
Morrison is the one person on this earth I feel nothing about lying to. And then I watch it happen: he winces. Actually winces, a full crack in the lacquer, and I stare, because I have finally located the one thing on this planet that makes David Morrison sweat.
“You’re afraid of her.” I can’t keep the grin down. “You’re afraid of a hundred-and-thirty-pound woman with a keyboard. That’s genuinely impressive.”
“That woman with a keyboard can end us.” He exhales like the sentence costs him cartilage.
“I cannot control Callie Carter. If she has those photos, she will dig, and she will grind, and she will write something airtight that makes this entire organization squirm under oath. She could end your career, and God knows whose else.”
Translation: she could end his. It tracks.
Last time, there was nothing he could spin, so the front office solved it with a chainsaw, the purge.
But a second Callie Carter story means ownership asking the question with his name in it: why this woman again, and why didn’t anyone see it coming?
Narrative control is his entire job description. She’s the one bug in his system.
“If Callie Carter has those images,” Morrison says, “we should all be praying.”
And here’s the sick part: I agree with him. I’m praying she doesn’t have them, just for entirely different reasons. His are professional.
Mine are that I’m falling for her.
And while we’re issuing prayers: I hope to God she never finds out that me coaching her son’s team started life as a PR plot.