Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Nate
Callie’s stretched out on one of the loungers in a green bikini that is conducting a sustained assault on my self-control, and I’m sprawled in the patio armchair in swim shorts with my legs up, doing absolutely nothing, which is a skill I appear to be learning.
Mid-October and still sunbathing weather; Texas is weird like that, and today I’m grateful for every degree of it.
I can’t get enough of looking at this woman.
Physically, fine, yes, obviously; the bikini is green and my thoughts are not.
But that’s not actually it. I’ve been around a lot of beautiful women.
I have never once in my life had the urge to just sit and look at one the way I’m looking at Callie right now, doing nothing, wanting nothing to change, cataloguing.
The mind under the sunglasses. The work ethic that shames mine.
The way she loves those boys like it’s a contact sport.
Even the thing she was doing to herself with that folder, I hated it, and it’s also proof of a heart most people in her business had surgically removed years ago.
Any other journalist would have metabolized that story and moved on by the following Tuesday.
She carried it for three years because she’s the only one who thought the people in it were real.
I’m falling for her. And here’s the part that actually shocks me: not the falling.
The fact that I’m not scared. Me, constitutionally immune to any human attachment not printed on a depth chart, and I’m just…
letting it happen. Enjoying it, even. If somebody told me right now that this is the rest of my life, this chair, this patio, this woman arguing with me about breakfast tacos, I’d sign undrafted. I’d die a happy man.
“Nate…”
She’s turned toward me, sunglasses pushed up, and her face has gone serious, not upset-serious, decision-serious, like she’s been building up to something the whole quiet hour —
And my phone buzzes.
I reach for it on reflex — Grant, and ignore it, because whatever it is can wait until Tuesday. “What’s up, sugar?”
It buzzes again. And again. And again, the specific machine-gun cadence that means somebody’s thumbs are panicking.
“Hold on.”
I open the thread, and the first thing I see is a screenshot from an auction house. Clean white listing page, professional photography, lot number. Auction opens Friday. The item, gleaming on black velvet, named right there in the title:
SUPER BOWL RING — DANNY ALVAREZ.
Under it, Grant’s messages, stacked like incoming fire:
Grant: Did you know about this?
Grant: Why is he doing it??
Grant: Please tell me it’s not for drugs
Grant: Are you going to answer?
While I’m still reading, the phone lights up with his call. I pick up.
“I knew.” No point making him ask twice.
“And you didn’t tell me.”
Not a question. And there it is, the first invoice arriving on a month of lies.
They were always going to start coming due; lies are a loan, not a gift.
Danny and I fought over the pictures and the surgery money, and Grant is about to discover, layer by layer, exactly how much I’ve been curating for everyone.
And behind that thought, the next domino, the one I look at and physically flinch: what’s next — Callie finding out how we actually met?
“There was nothing to tell.” I keep my voice level, aware of her ten feet away, pretending not to listen with her whole body. “He told me he was going to sell it. I told him he shouldn’t. That’s the diplomatic version of the conversation.”
“And you’re not worried where the money goes? Nate.” His voice cracks down the middle. “Do you have any idea how much product a man can buy with what that ring will clear?”
I know that panic. It’s the exact panic I run every Monday at Danny’s door in the second before I check his eyes. The one I felt looking at two orange bottles with their labels turned away.
“He told me it’s for a surgery. The knee.”
“And you believed him?”
Yup. That one.
“I want to believe him.” And the frustration finally gets loose.
“What do you want from me, man? We have run every play. I offered to pay for the surgery, flat refused. I offered to buy the ring outright, refused. I get it, he’s an addict, but he’s an addict with rich friends who love him, and if he wanted drug money he could ask either of us tomorrow and take it without a flicker of guilt, because it wouldn’t cost us anything.
He hasn’t asked. He listed the ring. I’ve done what I can do.
” I drag a hand down my face. “At this point let some tech guy from Austin win the auction and feel like a hero.”
It costs me something to say that out loud. The image of Danny’s ring in a display case in some stranger’s home office, a conversation piece next to the golf trophies.
“I’ll buy it.”
Of course he will. Grant Hale, heart the size of the state. “Anonymous bidder. He gets the money without knowing it’s family money, and the ring stays with people who bled for it. You disagree.”
“It’s your money. Do what you want with it.”
And I mean it, mostly. I ran the same scheme in my head weeks ago and talked myself out of it: if Danny won’t take my money clean, I’m not laundering it through pantomime.
That was the principled version. The honest version is that some part of me is relieved Grant’s doing it — Danny gets the money, the ring survives, and my hands stay technically clean.
Add hypocrite to the file. The file is getting thick.
“Will you at least come with me tonight? To his place. Talk to him.”
“One — Danny doesn’t want to see me right now. We had a fight —”
“You had a WHAT?”
And invoice number two arrives. Because I’ve been asking Grant how’s Danny doing for two weeks, casual, over lunch, like a man with nothing underneath the question, and never once mentioned that the reason I’ve been moping around like a dumped teenager is that I detonated a fight in Danny’s living room and walked out.
“He told me about the ring. I said something I shouldn’t have.
” True. Radically incomplete. What I said was the pictures, I used them as leverage, knowing exactly what they’d make him feel, and that particular omission is staying omitted, because it’s not mine to hand around. The circle is the circle.
“Doesn’t matter.” And this is Grant, this is the whole man in four words: “We’ll fix that too. Six o’clock, his place —”
“I’m not in San Antonio.”
A pause. “What do you mean you’re not in San Antonio?”
Genuine confusion, and honestly, fair. I have no life. The sudden existence of a life is a reportable event to everyone who knows me.
“I’m at Lake Travis. Back tomorrow.”
“Alone?”
“No.”
“With who —”
And I can hear it happen. The gears. The math. The text message banner. The parking-lot fence. All of it assembling in Grant Hale’s head in real time, and then, very quietly:
“Oh.”
That’s it. Oh. Two letters carrying the entire load: we’re arguing about Danny while I’m on a patio with the woman Danny blames.
The woman everyone blames. Everyone but me, and not because I forgave her.
There’s nothing to forgive. It took me a month to work that out and one syllable from Grant to feel the size of it.
“Okay,” he says finally, even, no edge in it anywhere. “Well. I’m going to go see him tonight and make sure he’s all right. And I’m probably buying that ring.”
“Sounds good.”
I hang up, and the guilt lands with its full shipping weight, and here’s the thing: Grant doesn’t do passive-aggressive.
That last sentence wasn’t engineered to gut me.
It meant exactly its contents: he will go, he will check, he will buy.
It wasn’t about Nate Rivers at all. But Nate Rivers has been lying out of both sides of his mouth for a month, to Danny, to Grant, to Deacon, to a locker room, and worst of all to the woman ten feet away: about the photos I pray she never sees, and about the fact that the first time I ever walked onto her son’s field, I was a PR deliverable with her name on the work order.
I need to start paying these invoices. I know it. I can feel the whole ledger leaning.
And like a coward, I decide to start with the small ones. Danny first. The ring. The fight. Manageable debts. Because if I tell Callie the big one now, today, here, after last night, after the folder, I don’t think I can survive the way her face will change.
Soon, I tell myself. The coward’s favorite word.
“I’m sorry, sugar.” I stand and start collecting our things off the patio. “We need to head back early. There’s something I have to sort out.”
She watches me for a long second, the serious thing she’d been about to say folded up and put away somewhere, and nods.
Neither of us says what we were carrying. Two people, two pockets, two grenades.
#
Callie
Tuesday morning I’m back at the office with my coffee, a day earlier than planned, because we drove back Monday night instead.
I never told him about the pictures.