Chapter 16 #2
She came to Eli’s practice on Thursday. She came again today.
She claims it’s for the ambiance. What it actually is, I suspect, is a security detail, she’s worried I might physically assault Nate Rivers in front of twenty children.
Which is insulting, because my plan is far more dignified: total, glacial, professional-grade ignoring.
A plan that has proven extremely easy to execute, because he hasn’t shown up.
Not Thursday. Not today. I overheard another parent asking, and Johnson, apologetic, oblivious, said Coach Nate texted that his schedule’s gotten too busy.
Too busy. Sure. I know his schedule down to the container labels.
“I miss Coach Rivers,” Eli says, to his lo mein, in the too-casual voice.
It guts me on a frequency I wasn’t braced for.
Eli doesn’t do dramatic attachment, he audits, he withholds, he makes adults earn it, which is exactly why this lands so hard: Nate had earned it.
Slowly, show-up by show-up, the man had been filling a hole another man dug.
And now my serious boy is quietly redoing the math he’s had to do before, recalculating which adults are reliable, and arriving at the familiar answer.
Left again. And I can’t explain it to him.
There is no eight-year-old-compatible version of the truth.
‘Nate Rivers isn’t a good man, baby; be grateful he’s gone’ is a sentence that would cost Eli something I can’t refund.
“But we’ll see him at the game Sunday!” Finn announces, sunshine-bright, problem solved.
Right. The game. The passes I still haven’t engineered a believable escape from, at least none that doesn’t break two hearts that did nothing wrong. They’re in Eli’s equipment bag, inner pocket, guarded like treasure. Ticking.
The boys finish and vanish to their rooms, and Priya and I are left with the cartons and the kitchen light.
“So.” She folds her hands. “Ready to send it to Marty?”
“Yes.”
No.
The auction closed Friday. Won by an anonymous bidder, could be Grant, could be Nate, could be a stranger with money; the listing doesn’t say and doesn’t have to.
And the fact of it, anonymous buyer, plus what I know of Nate and Grant’s rescue plan, went into the draft.
Factually airtight. Aimed, like everything else in that document.
What I just told Priya is the lie. I’m not ready to send it, because between Friday and tonight, a second article has appeared on my laptop.
I didn’t plan it. It arrived the way the real ones always do, sideways, at one in the morning, while the takedown sat in the other window being brilliant and cruel.
The second article is about an athlete who loved his sport so completely it became his entire house foundation.
Who got hurt, and did a desperate, wrong thing rather than lose the one thing holding him up.
Whose plan failed anyway, they always fail anyway, and who is now selling his championship ring for one more chance at his own knee.
It isn’t a sports story. It’s a story about the stupid, human things people do to keep the one thing that matters, and about the machine that lets them fall when the doing catches up with them.
The irony is not lost on me. I wrote it at this table while refusing to speak to a man who did a stupid, human thing to protect the person who matters most to him.
And there’s a thought underneath that one I keep stepping around, because it has teeth: if Nate had known, if I’d told him at the lake, the way I meant to; I have the photos, and I will never use them against you or Danny, he would have listened.
He would have helped me tell it right. I know he would have.
It changes nothing about what he did to me.
But it bothers me, at one in the morning, that he thinks I betrayed him.
Because I didn’t. My sin was silence. It’s a real sin.
It’s just not the one he convicted me of.
“Are you sure you want that thing seeing daylight?” Priya’s watching me over her carton, the lifestyle-writer glaze fully off.
This is the other Priya. The one the newsroom forgets exists.
“I get it — Nate did you dirty. But walk the blast radius with me, Callie. You’re not destroying him. You’re destroying Danny.”
“The dirt lands on Nate too.” My voice comes out flat, rehearsed, because it is rehearsed. “Fine, he doesn’t touch the stuff. But he enables a known addict. Funds him. Covers for him. This country was founded by Puritans, Priya, we impeached a president over a blowjob. ‘Clean but complicit’ plays.”
“So your theory of damage rests on people who died three hundred years ago and a man who got a blowjob in the Oval Office before either of us could vote.” She sets the carton down, and now she is a prosecutor holding the murder weapon in a clear evidence bag.
“Callie. I know you’re hurt. Danny Alvarez didn’t hurt you. ”
I don’t answer, because she’s right, and we both know she’s right, and the takedown knows it too, it’s known since its first paragraph.
I don’t even want to hurt Nate. That’s the stupidest part.
Contrary to the scouting report delivered at a Little League fence, I am not, in fact, a bloodsucking bitch.
But the train is moving and I bought the ticket myself: Monday, Marty gets the draft, the one where they all look bad, no heroes, no excuses.
That was the deal I made with my own pain, and my pain does not renegotiate.
“Why don’t you just call him?” Priya says it gently, which is how she delivers the hard ones. “Talk to him. About how it all actually went down.”
“Absolutely not.”
It’s out before her sentence fully lands, so fast I surprise us both.
“Interesting.” She tilts her head. “Are you afraid that if you call him, you’ll forgive him?”
“No.”