Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Callie
I walk into the office having just, and I want to state this plainly, as a professional woman, snuck out of my own workplace like a teenager breaking curfew to eat tacos with a quarterback in his car in a grocery store parking lot.
It’s absurd. I’m a divorced mother of two with a mortgage, a career, and a rental sedan, and the highlight of my day, the thing I checked the clock for all morning, was breakfast tacos in a parked Suburban with the radio low.
Nineteen-year-old me is somewhere applauding.
Twenty-nine-year-old me told a small taco-based lie to leave the building.
Somehow college is knocking on my door again, and I keep answering.
“Where were you?” Priya asks, one eyebrow already at cruising altitude. Bloodhounds retire early out of professional envy of this woman.
“Coffee.” I display the cup I strategically acquired from the shop downstairs on my way in, because apparently I run cons now. Full tradecraft.
“Mm. And who dropped you off yesterday?”
She asked the same question yesterday, and yesterday I said Uber, and yesterday she let it go because she was on deadline covering some Dallas charity gala. Today, tragically, Priya has no deadline. An unsupervised Priya is a federal investigation with lip gloss.
“I told you. Uber.” I open my laptop and begin working on my draft, and by working I mean arranging my face above it.
“That’s an expensive Uber.”
It isn’t Priya who says it. It’s Ellie, from behind her monitors, without surfacing, in the mild tone of a coroner noting time of death. It’s always the quiet one holding the knife.
“See, I have a theory.” Priya rolls her chair around to my side of the desk, which is how I know this has been scheduled. “My theory is that somebody has finally succumbed to the Nate Rivers charm offensive.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I shake my head with tremendous casualness. Not too much casualness. Casualness is a dosage.
“I genuinely hoped you’d say that.”
And she slaps a piece of paper down on my desk like a prosecutor resting.
It’s a printout. A photo of Nate, game-day suit, sunglasses, walking away from a very recognizable black Suburban, under a month-old headline from some outlet’s photo roundup: OUTLAWS ARRIVE FOR GAME DAY IN STYLE.
She’s printed exactly one player’s arrival.
One. The rest of the roster was apparently not relevant to her research.
“Listen.” Priya taps the Suburban with one red nail.
“I know everyone here forgets this, including you, but I am an actual journalist. I can source. I can cross-reference. I have theories and I test them. The weddings-and-gossip column pays the bills, and I care about the bills more than I care about being taken seriously. But investigating you?” She smiles.
“That’s not work. That’s public service. ”
“Fine.” I put both hands up. “My car died Tuesday after practice. He was leaving at the same time. He offered to drive me and the boys home, and since the car was still dead the next morning, he offered the school run too. That is the entire story.”
And I’m not even lying. I am merely omitting a hallway, a wall, a kiss that rearranged my molecular structure, and every taco since. Omission is not lying. Omission is editing.
“So.” Priya folds her hands like a talk-show host closing in.
“Nate Rivers, a man about whom your stated opinion fluctuates between dislike and armed indifference, offers a morning school run, and your answer is yes.
Not ‘thanks, I’ll call the father of my children.
' Not ‘I’ll call Priya, my beloved friend with a functioning car.
' Not the neighbor two doors down whose kids attend the same school. Darling.” She leans in.
“You wanted it to be him. You wanted Nate Rivers to be the one who saved you.”
“Okay, Sherlock.” I pin my eyes to the screen and type several words that are not words.
“Callie.”
The register changes, the glitter comes off it, and that’s the voice that makes me look up.
“If you want to spend time with the man, spend time with the man. Truly. And nobody deserves to enjoy herself with a man the word ‘hot’ doesn’t even begin to cover more than you do.
” She holds my eyes. “But you are writing a piece that could take him down. Or hurt him. Or hurt somebody he loves. So it’s one or the other, babe: you hurt him, or you walk into Marty’s office and hand the story to someone whose judgment isn’t compromised.
Because it is compromised. You know it is. ”
“I know,” I say, after a pause that costs me something.
Because I’ve run this math. All of it, at five-thirty in the morning, twice.
The article changed shape because of Nate, not because he lobbied me; he doesn’t even know what I’m writing.
Because he stood in a dark shed and handed me the why, and the why turned my scandal piece into a human one.
But no editor, no reader, no media-ethics panel on earth will accept ‘the subject was honest with me and it changed my perspective.' They’ll say I didn’t go for the jugular because I’m biased.
And here’s my answer, the one I keep arriving at from every direction: they’d be right that I won’t go for the jugular.
They’d be wrong about why it matters. Because if I hand this story off, to protect my objectivity, to protect my reputation, to do the clean thing, whoever takes it will go straight for the throat.
They’ll write QB CAUGHT WITH DRUGS, or DANNY ALVAREZ, AT IT AGAIN, seventy-two hours of traffic, two men’s lives for lunch.
The clean thing and the right thing are pointing in different directions, and I’m standing at the intersection with six photographs.
I don’t get up. I don’t go to Marty’s office.
I keep the story. God help me, and God help my judgment, I keep it.
#
Nate
My eyes keep going to the bleachers, where some guy is sitting next to Callie, and I keep grinding my molars into powder.
I don’t even have standing for what I’m feeling.
Objectively, and I keep running the tape objectively, like film review, which should have been my first clue that I’ve lost it, there’s nothing there.
He’s a respectful distance away. Friend distance.
No leaning, no touching, no angle of intimacy at any level.
He could be anybody’s dad making small talk.
I have no case. I file the jealousy under inadmissible and return my attention to the eight-year-olds executing my game plan on the field, because yes, it’s Saturday, and yes I have a game tomorrow, and I am at a Little League game by choice. We’ve stopped being surprised by this.
Then Finn migrates. Slides off the bench, rounds his mother, and climbs into the man’s lap like a cat claiming furniture.
Ah.
That’s the ex.
And now I’m bothered by something entirely different, which is: why is he here? He skips the games, that’s canon; I benched a heartbroken kid over it, and the one Saturday he materializes is… fine. Fine. Good for Eli. I return to the field.
And then I catch myself doing a thing I have never once done to another man off a football field.
On the field, measuring men is the job, is he faster than me, can I climb the pocket away from him, professional questions with professional answers.
This is not that. This is one peacock assessing another peacock’s tail, wingspan, and general plumage, every pun in that metaphor fully intended.
He’s seated, so I can’t verify height, but call it six-two, six-three; even standing he’s got an inch on me at most, either direction.
He’s in shape, legitimately; from things Callie’s dropped, the man takes his gym time more seriously than his custody time.
But I win this round on a technicality, the technicality being that I am a professional athlete.
I get paid to be in punishing condition.
It’s not a fair fight, which is exactly why I’m comfortable declaring victory.
I make myself watch the game. I am a grown man. I am a franchise quarterback. I am wondering how much a man behind me can deadlift.
When it ends, we win; the little bastards are becoming a machine, I engineer some extremely casual lingering in Eli’s vicinity while he breaks down his gear, even help him with the pads, as Callie and the ex come down from the bleachers, Finn running point ahead of them as always.
“Hey, bud. That was a good run out there.” The ex ruffles Eli’s sweat-soaked hair, easy, warm, annoyingly warm, and then his eyes come up and land on me.
I watch the recognition arrive. Franchise quarterback, standing at his kid’s Little League game holding a clipboard with today’s game plan.
And to the man’s genuine credit: nothing.
No backseat coaching, no hot take about my Sunday reads, no bit about hating the Outlaws, no phone.
Recognition, a polite nod, moving on. Highest marks any parent has scored on this sideline all season, and it would cost me nothing to admit that if he weren’t sitting where he was sitting.
“You boys ready to go?”
Go?
Everything in me wants to look at Callie with open subtitles, go WHERE, but I keep the face professional, for two reasons.
One: I don’t know this man’s temperature.
Callie’s never described him as anything worse than absent, they split over unavailability, not temper, but I have no data on how he handles surprises, and I am not staging a scene inside a stadium of twenty raised phones.
Two, and bigger: Callie and I agreed to keep this quiet.
And ‘this,’ for now, is tacos and kissing and a text thread I’d die before letting Grant read, nothing that survives a headline.
My face is on three ad campaigns, I give interviews weekly, I do a podcast circuit monthly.
The second anyone clocks me with her, it’s national content by dinnertime.
I’m not ashamed of her, the opposite; I’d buy a billboard and print on it that I enjoy having breakfast tacos with Callie Carter.
I’m terrified of what the scrutiny does to her, and worse, to two boys who didn’t sign up for cameras at school pickup.
Until she and I know what road we’re on, my name stays off her mailbox.
“Their bags are in my car,” Callie tells the ex, and the whole caravan starts moving toward the parking lot.
I have my phone out at a speed that would embarrass me if anyone could clock it.
Me: Wait for me in the parking lot?
Then I pocket it and help Johnson haul cones and dummies with the serene patience of a man who is not internally sprinting.
Fifteen minutes later, the lot’s nearly empty and Callie is leaning against her rental, arms crossed, watching me cross to her, and I have to physically override the urge to close the distance the way I want to.
Polite radius. Parents still circulating. Professional smile.
“Your ex, I assume.”
“He has the boys until Tuesday.” She says it lightly, but the light has an edge.
“The custody order says at least once a month, and behold, the monthly observance. They’ll spend the weekend on his couch watching TV.
” A beat, and the sarcasm drops in, dry as August. “But hey. At least they get to see their father.”
By now I know Callie well enough to read the footnote under that: she thinks it’s bullshit, she’s glad they’re going, and both things are true at once, and it costs her something every single time. Noted, filed, and —
Wait.
Until Tuesday.
The idea arrives fully formed, the way the best plays do, and it is so good that I genuinely don’t know how I survive it if she says no.
“Can you take Monday and Tuesday off?”
“Probably… why?” The eyebrow goes up, the suspicious one, the one I’ve started cataloguing.
“We’re going to Lake Travis.” I’m already smiling. “I’ve got a game tomorrow, but it’s the early slot, I can pick you up at five. It’s a couple hours’ drive. I have a house on the water. Monday’s my rest day, I have zero reasons to be in this city, and we drive back early Tuesday.”
“We?” She’s laughing now. “That doesn’t sound like a we decision. That sounds like a Nate decision that we is being informed of.”
“Okay. Fine.” I exhale, reset, run it from under center like a gentleman. “Callie. Would you like to come with me to my lake house tomorrow afternoon?”
“Yes.”
That’s all she gets out, because she’s laughing, that laugh, the one that started all of this, the one I once considered paying Darius to keep provoking, and my brain performs a brief, total system failure right there in the parking lot.
“So,” I say, when service is restored. “We’re going to Lake Travis.”