Chapter 2 #2
“Friday is live,” she says. “Ninety minutes, two hundred thousand people, and a woman who has read everything ever written about you.” She picks up her tablet. “You’ll walk in knowing nothing about her. I’m going to spend today deciding whether I’m comfortable with that.”
***
Earl’s equipment room smells like fresh laundry and the particular mustiness of a space that’s held the same man’s quiet work for decades. I drop into the folding chair he keeps angled toward the door, the one that’s always free and never mentioned, and he doesn’t look up from the bibs.
“Early,” Earl says. Not a question.
“Flew back overnight.”
He hums something low, a hymn I can never quite place, and keeps folding, hands moving in the rhythm they’ve moved in for as long as I’ve known him.
“Got you covered, son.” He reaches for the machine on the shelf and pours into the captain’s mug without asking, sets it by my elbow, close enough to reach, goes back to the bibs.
I hold it in both hands and don’t speak.
This is the only room in the building where I don’t have to be anything.
Earl has never once asked me how I’m holding up.
He’s never mentioned the funeral, or the way my jokes got louder after it, or the notebook that lives in my bag and doesn’t open in public.
He doesn’t look at me and see through me.
He just doesn’t look, and lets me sit in it, and that’s the rarer gift by a distance.
“Got a big one Friday,” I say, mostly to the mug.
“Mm.” Another bib. “Eat before you go. Them places, the plates come out the size of a coaster.”
I laugh. Some of it is real.
When I stand to go, his hand lands on my shoulder for exactly one beat. No words, just the weight.
I’m at the door when the academy call-up comes in — nineteen, three weeks with the first team, jaw not unclenched once — and stops short at finding a senior pro in a place he’d thought was private.
“You’re alright,” I tell him, and step out.
I don’t go far. The door doesn’t latch properly and I stop in the corridor. Not to listen. To see.
“Sit, son,” Earl says.
The folding chair. The captain’s mug, filled without asking. The hum, starting up low. And the kid lowers himself into the exact shape of quiet Earl just built for me, and his shoulders come down an inch.
Two years I’ve used that room like it was mine.
It was never mine. Earl runs a sanctuary and lets every one of us believe we’re the only one who found it. The chair’s angled at the door because somebody’s always about to need it.
It’s the most generous thing I know, and he does it folding towels, and he’d be appalled if I ever said so out loud.
***
Mateo finds me at the far post after training, when the pitch has emptied and I’m hitting balls at a target nobody asked me to hit.
He doesn’t say anything for a while. That’s his whole method.
“You’re thinking different,” he says eventually.
“I’m thinking about being deeply emotionally available for cross-rival content.” I strike one. “Opening my heart to manufactured authenticity. It’s a journey, Mateo. I’d like you to be part of it.”
He waits out the bit with the long look of a man who’s seen seven hundred games and a thousand deflections better than mine.
“Okay,” he says. “Now say it.”
“There’s nothing to—”
“You took the red-eye and you’re here at five.”
“I’m always here at five.”
“You’re here at five because you don’t sleep.” He bends, unhurried, and reties a boot that doesn’t need it. “Today you’re here at five and you’re happy.”
He says happy the way a doctor names a symptom.
“She took a swing at me on a call this morning,” I say. “In front of everybody. Landed it, too.”
“And?”
“And I’ve been standing out here for forty minutes hitting a cone.”
“Hm.”
“That’s it? Hm?”
“You want more than hm, say more than that.” He straightens and starts toward the tunnel. “Be careful, hermano. You’ve been very fine for two years.”
“I have been very fine.”
“Yes.” He doesn’t look back. “That’s what I said.”
***
Her contact card is still sitting in my phone from yesterday. No photo, no emoji — Priya put a wink on it and I watched Sloane Vega remove it in front of me, one keystroke at a time, with the face of a woman defusing something.
I type Looking forward to working with you. Delete. Corporate. Hear we survived the same brief — delete. So. Fake married — no.
Then I sit in an empty locker room with wet hair and a decision to make, and I make it wide awake, with both thumbs, on purpose.
I send the winking emoji.
To the head of communications for the New York Sentinels. Who removed the last one by hand.
There is roughly one second where it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever done.
The three dots appear. Vanish. Appear.
I sit there watching a woman who beat me in public four hours ago decide what I’m worth.
Her reply arrives. One character.
.
A period. An entire sentence of contempt folded into a single keystroke, and the worst part — the part I’m not telling Mateo, not telling anyone — is that it’s the most interesting thing anybody’s said to me all week.
I read it four times. Three more than contempt deserves.
Then Priya’s text lands.
Friday’s locked. Live-streamed dinner, 7pm, reservation under both names.
And underneath it, a second message.
You asked what’s in the file.
The attachment loads. Forty-one pages. Three years of coverage, screenshots, blog posts, a timeline somebody built in a spreadsheet, and a filename with a man’s name in it that isn’t mine.
Four hours ago she told a room full of people exactly what she would do, and then she did it, and I sat there and let her.
So I know what she’d do with this.
I sit with my ankles taped and my thumb over a document I have absolutely no right to open, and here’s the thing about being the guy everybody finds easy.
Nobody has ever once checked whether I’d read it.