7. Frankie
Frankie
They really do send a car.
It’s black and quiet and the driver calls me Ms. Delaney, which nobody has done since a jury summons, and Becca spends the whole ride to the arena rehearsing for a negotiation only she is excited about.
I spend it looking at my hands and hearing the same four words on a loop, the way you keep a song you hate.
Who should I make it out to?
Steve.
Two days, and I can still feel the exact temperature of the moment my whole body understood before my eyes did.
I’ve written that scene, the beloved stranger materializing, a dozen different ways, and in every single version it’s the good part.
It has never once occurred to me to write it the way it actually goes: a man using the tenderest thing you ever gave him as a weapon, quietly, in a voice for two, while a line of people who love what you did to him waits behind him holding it in hardcover.
The rest of him you got right, and I’ll never forgive you for it.
“You’re doing the loop,” Becca says, not looking up from her phone. “Stop the loop. I need you liquid in there.”
“Liquid?”
“Flexible. Solution-oriented.” She flips to a new screen. “Lawyered.”
The Altitude Center from the players’ entrance is all polished concrete and glass, expensive and hushed, and they walk us through a corridor lined with photographs of men mid-triumph, and then, because God has never once wasted a metaphor on me, they walk us past the Wall.
I stop. I can’t help it.
It goes up and up. Little gold squares, floor to ceiling, thousands and thousands of them catching the light like scales on something asleep, and each one is a person.
A family, a retiree, a kid with a poster.
Eighteen thousand bets on one man’s body and one man’s story, and I arrive here as the woman who published the crack in it.
The scale of him was an abstraction until this exact hallway.
My book is an object you can hold in one hand. This is a wall.
“Breathe,” Becca says, and takes my elbow like a handler, and that’s how I enter the room where they’re going to fix me.
Conference room, tenth floor, glass on two sides, mountains staged in the windows like set dressing.
Present and accounted for: two club lawyers with matching frowns, a man introduced as from the league office who never speaks and misses nothing, Becca, vibrating.
And at the head of the table, in cream, Gwen Marsh, VP of Brand and Communications, who shakes my hand warmly with both of hers, tells me she devoured the book in one night, genuinely wonderful, and then clicks a small remote like she’s cocking it.
Nick is at the far end of the table.
I make myself look at him once, all the way, because I decided in the car I wasn’t going to spend this meeting flinching.
Charcoal quarter-zip, forearms on the table, utterly still.
He is looking at a legal pad, not at me.
He will not look at me for the length of this meeting, I understand, with a stupid little drop in my stomach, and the drop makes me furious at myself, because that, that right there, the body still leaning toward the man across any given room, is how we all got here.
“So,” Gwen says. “Let’s talk about the story.”
The first slide says STORY CORRECTION, white on Summit gold.
Gwen Marsh presents the way sharks swim, smooth, forward, no drag.
Slide two is a sentiment graph, a red line diving.
The scandal read, she explains: aging legend, duped, surveilled, exposed by an anonymous opportunist. Fan trust wobbling, two sponsors asking questions, the phrase morals review said aloud once at league level, not about anything proven, just about noise.
On the graph the red line hits Thursday and there’s a little skull she’s tasteful enough not to have animated. Thursday is Barlow.
“He has your name, your face, and a photograph,” she tells me. “He’ll run identity, then he’ll run implication. His version, you targeted a vulnerable retired athlete, extracted private material, monetized it. Predator with a manuscript.” She lets it sit. “Is it fair? No. Will it stick? Forever.”
“And the alternative,” Becca says, already leaning in.
Slide four. Gwen doesn’t even have to click with drama, the drama is built in.
Two words: LOVE STORY.
“You met on a plane,” Gwen says, simply, like she’s reading a flap jacket, and the horrible thing, the thing I will be sick about later, is that it’s beautiful.
“A private romance. She protected him the only way a writer knows how, by moving him into fiction. He came back for one last season; the book came out; the internet did what it does. Neither of them planned it. Both of them leaned in.” Click.
A timeline: confirmations, a home-opener appearance, a gala in late October, organic moments, a schedule of being seen.
“We don’t announce anything. We let them catch you. Caught is credible.”
“It’s a fake relationship,” I say, because apparently no one else in this glass room is going to say the actual words. “You’re describing a fake relationship.”
“I’m describing a true story,” Gwen says, pleasant, terrifying, “with professional staging. Every couple you’ve ever admired in public is this. We’re just formalizing the draft process.”
Down the table, Nick puts his pen on the legal pad, square to the edge, and speaks for the first time in an hour. “And if I say no?”
Gwen doesn’t blink. “Then Thursday, Barlow runs predator-with-a-manuscript, legal invokes the conduct-review language in your contract while the league does its noise assessment, and the option you came back for dies in a committee.” Her voice stays kind, which is the worst part.
“Nobody in this room gets to want things, Nick. That’s Thursday’s whole lesson. ”
“Noted,” he says, in the voice I last heard at a folding table, and picks the pen back up, and that is the entire rebellion a man gets to have when eighteen thousand people hold shares in his body.
And here is what I don’t say, what I will never say in a room with a sentiment graph in it, the actual reason my hand is going to pick up the pen at the end of this: chapter nineteen.
Right now, Barlow and the internet are hunting a scandal, and a scandal digs.
It subpoenas, it sources, it calls facilities in Arizona asking cute questions.
But a love story closes the case. If the author and the athlete are simply, boringly, gorgeously together, then the book is what fiction always was, embroidery on a romance, and the lost year is a novelist’s invention, and nobody ever goes looking for the real desert.
I can’t protect him from what I already did.
I can stand in front of it. This contract is the only shield anyone’s going to let me hold, and it happens to be shaped like a lie about my heart, which, fine.
Occupational hazard. I’ve been lying about my heart in fiction for eleven books; now I get to do it in wardrobe.
The lawyers walk us through narrative consistency next, which means: agree on your own history. Where you met. When it turned. There’s a woman with a laptop whose whole job is writing down what we say, and Gwen prompts, “Where did you meet? Keep it simple.”
“A plane,” we say. Both of us. Flat, together, in unison, like a rehearsed bit, and the room goes momentarily, awkwardly silent, because you cannot fake that timing, and every person at this table just heard it.
“A plane,” Gwen repeats, delighted, writing it down. “Perfect. True things are so efficient.”
He’s looking at the legal pad again. There’s a muscle going in his jaw like a pulse.
The lawyer asks when the relationship resumed, and Gwen supplies, smooth, “When he came back to Denver. The comeback brought them back into contact. It writes itself,” and I sit there listening to Gwen’s team adapt our actual lives into their own alibi, every fact bent one degree, and I understand that from this day forward even the true parts of us are scripted.
Especially the true parts. They’re what holds the fake ones up.
The mechanics take ninety minutes. There’s an NDA with my name on it, which is somehow the most frightening document I’ve ever seen.
A mutual appearance agreement. Conduct standards, exclusivity optics, an end date, the words actually printed, term concludes at the conclusion of the club’s season.
A relationship with a buzzer. My publisher, Becca, reports, she is thrilled with the direction, which means she has already counted the money that will come with it.
Somewhere in hour two, one of the lawyers, delicately, raises what he calls the demographic optics, meaning: he is forty-one, she is thirty, is that a problem, and Gwen says, bright as a coin, “We tested it. The gap performs beautifully. Silver fox is a whole genre, ask her,” and gestures at me, at my book, at my life, and the room chuckles, and I sit there while a focus group I never met approves the distance between my age and the age of a man I’ve slept with.
That’s when it lands, fully, what this is.
Not the fakeness. The staging. They have slides about his body.
They have a graph with my face on it. Every private thing either of us has ever done near the other is now an asset with a performance review, and the two people at this table are the only two items on the agenda that don’t get a vote on what they’re for.
“I want it on the record,” I say, “that I hate this.”
“Noted with warmth,” Gwen says.
“And I want a clause.” I look at Becca, who’s already writing. “Nothing scripted about the book’s contents. Nobody feeds either of us lines about what’s true in it. The book stays fiction. Full stop.”
For the first time in two hours, the far end of the table moves.
Nothing dramatic. His eyes come up off the legal pad and land on me for exactly the length of one held breath, unreadable, dark as a storm cloud, and something crosses the space between us that the sentiment graph has no axis for.
Then it’s gone, and he’s back to the legal pad, and I sign.
I sign with Sharon. I don’t realize I’ve done it until the green ink is drying on the line: the pen that has signed every book I ever loved into strangers’ hands, deployed onto the first document of my life that’s built entirely out of lie.
Sharon, forgive me. I clip her back onto my notebook and my hand is not quite steady and I hate everyone in this room including, at a rough estimate, sixty percent of myself.
Nick signs last, left-handed, one stroke, like initialing a line change. He caps the pen. He still hasn’t looked at me longer than a breath.
Gwen collects the pages the way a dealer collects cards.
“Wonderful. First beat is Saturday, home opener, you’ll sit with the families, we’ll walk you out after through the west corridor, there’ll be a photographer who got lucky.
” She smiles at us both, and here’s the thing about Gwen Marsh I won’t let myself look at until later, when I can afford it: she isn’t cruel.
She’s worse. She’s efficient, and we are, at last, on-brand.
“Congratulations, you two. It’s a beautiful story. ”
The meeting ends in a shuffle of chairs and lawyers checking phones, and I’m at the elevator bank with Becca three steps behind me when he catches up, because his legs are a foot longer than the whole world’s, and for one second we are alone in a concrete corridor built for men the size of doorways.
“Clause was smart,” he says. Eyes forward, pushing the elevator button once, a man conserving everything. “The book stays fiction. You keep it that way, we’ll get through the season.”
“Nick.” My voice comes out smaller than I wrote it in my head. “In the store, I couldn’t say it right, but I need you to know I never once meant—”
“I read the book, Frankie.” He steps into the elevator and turns, and finally, fully, terribly, looks at me, and it’s not hate, which I could’ve survived. It’s emptiness, every light in him switched off at once. “That’s the problem. Nobody means anything like that.”
The doors close on him looking at the floor number, jaw working, and I stand in the corridor of the arena I just set on fire, dating him.
The woman rides down in the second elevator, I narrate, because it’s that or cry in front of a wall of gold. The woman has a boyfriend now. Eighteen thousand people are going to be so happy.