Chapter 13
Sloane
Iam standing in the Atlanta Forge players’ lounge cataloguing Carter Reinhardt’s laugh out of sheer reflex, except this is the first time the laugh won’t go in the column marked performance.
Jules has dropped his backpack. Or the backpack has betrayed him — the zip’s been gone at one corner for a while, the kind of small broken thing a kid decides he can live with rather than spend on.
It’s emptied itself across the lounge floor in a fan of index cards, a kid’s careful block handwriting on every one, economics terms and their definitions: the private homework of a nineteen-year-old who thought the room was empty.
He’s on the floor before the last card has settled. “Sir — sorry — I’ve got it, don’t, you don’t have to—”
Carter’s already down there. Not crouched, the way a man performs helping. All the way down on his knees on the lounge carpet in training kit, gathering cards into a stack, and he turns one over and reads it aloud.
“Quantitative easing,” he says, in an accent that belongs to no country, something between a game-show host and a man being gently strangled. “The process by which a central bank—”
“That’s — you’re saying it wrong.”
“—by which a central bank acquires—”
“You’re doing a voice.”
“Then read it to me right. I’m an idiot, I need the help.
” He holds the card back out, and Jules takes it, and corrects him — and then doesn’t stop at correcting him, explains the whole mechanism, fast and certain and forgetting to be embarrassed about it, and Carter nods along like a man learning, asks a follow-up he plainly already knows the answer to, and lets the kid be right out loud, at length, in front of someone senior.
The rookie who apologizes to furniture is sitting cross-legged on the floor lecturing a man the league pays to be looked at, and laughing — the real kind, head down, unguarded — because Carter Reinhardt decided that for ninety seconds the frightened one should get to be the expert in the room.
He doesn’t appear to know he’s doing it.
There’s no camera in this room. No crew, no lens, no Priya, no reason. Just a man the league pays to be charming being something else entirely — kind, and quiet about it — to a frightened nineteen-year-old when nobody is keeping score.
I should look away. Watching him do this has no professional function — there’s no deliverable in it, no optic to capture, nothing Priya could ever use — and I am, if nothing else, a woman who doesn’t spend attention without a return. But I don’t look away.
He’s got an index card in one hand and the rookie’s entire nervous system in the other, and he’s pretending to fumble the economics terms so the kid gets to correct him, handing a frightened teenager the small private power of being right about something, and he doesn’t appear to know he’s doing it.
That’s the part I can’t file. Performed kindness I’d recognize on sight — I’ve staged a hundred photo ops of athletes crouching next to sick children.
This isn’t staged. There’s no one here to see it but me, and he didn’t know I was coming.
I open a new note on my tablet. Sit with my thumb over the screen. Close it without typing anything, because there’s nowhere in my system to put this, and the not-having is starting to feel like a structural problem.
***
Priya gathers us into the media suite an hour later, glowing.
“The next beat is a letter,” she announces. “You write to each other. We publish them on the league microsite — a mid-campaign romantic touchstone. Very intimate, very shareable.” She slides two printed templates across the table. “I drafted starters, so you’re not staring at a blank page.”
I read mine. It’s good.
That’s the problem. Every sentence is precisely what I would write about a man I felt absolutely nothing for — warm, specific, deniable, exactly the kind of competent lie I’ve built a career on.
Across the table, Carter reads his copy, and I watch his jaw set the way it sets right before the jokes stop. He doesn’t make one. He just puts the template face-down on the table, deliberate, the way you set down something you’ve decided not to use.
“We’ll write our own,” he says.
“The template tests beautifully—”
“We’ll write our own,” I say, and Priya looks between us, and chooses, this once, not to win the small fight so she can keep the large one.
***
It takes two hours, in a conference room, on paper.
I refused the shared document. Priya had pre-named it OurLove_Final_v3, which tells you everything about how planned the spontaneous is around here, so we printed the templates instead and have been passing pages back and forth across a laminate table like it’s 1994.
The room’s too cold, the way conference rooms always are, and there’s a whiteboard behind him with someone’s half-erased forecast from another meeting, and a plate of the sad beige cookies that materialize at every league function, and none of it matters, because what’s actually happening at this table is the most naked conversation I’ve had in years — conducted entirely in crossed-out lines and marginalia, two people who can’t say a true thing out loud saying them in ink instead and agreeing to call it work.
He crosses out my first paragraph. In the margin, in handwriting better than I expected, he writes something plainer than anything I’d allow myself — no hedge, no craft, just a true sentence with the safety off.
I cross out his plainer version, because it’s too exposed, and I write something that’s somehow both precise and true at the same time, which is a thing I’m not supposed to be able to do anymore.
We go back and forth like that for the better part of an hour, and somewhere in it the register changes without either of us calling it. The first pass, we’re editing a campaign asset.
By the fourth, we’re just telling each other true things on paper and correcting them for accuracy — his pen, then mine — crossing out anything that isn’t exactly so, the way you’d walk a witness back through a statement.
I have never in my life been this careful about getting something right that no one was ever going to grade.
He reads the last version. Something in him quiets. “That’s it,” he says, quiet. “That’s the one.”
By the third pass we’ve written something that’s neither Priya’s template nor anyone’s performance, and we both know it, and we sit on opposite sides of a cheap table not looking at the thing we just made because looking at it would mean saying what it is.
“For the campaign,” I say.
“Sure,” he says, and neither of us believes me, and he’s gracious enough not to say so.
***
I send the finals to Marcus for approval, because protocol is the one wall I haven’t let come down.
He calls in fifteen minutes.
“They’re excellent,” he says. “The pilot focus group’s authenticity index is the highest we’ve recorded on the campaign. People believe it completely.” A pause, smooth as glass. “Tell me you’re maintaining appropriate professional distance, Sloane.”
That’s the third time.
I have it in my notebook — the first, the second, a line drawn between them. Two of anything is a pattern, I wrote. Three is a verdict. And here it is, the third, arriving not as a question but as a thing being entered into a record, a door easing shut so gently you’d thank the man closing it.
“I am,” I say.
“Good.” A beat that costs me more than the words. “I trust you to know what that means.”
The call ends. I sit at the conference table with the letters in front of me — the truest thing I’ve written in years, approved by a man who just told me, in the politest possible language, that he’s started building the file — and I don’t move for a full minute.
***
His text comes at ten.
I didn’t know I could write something that honest and not feel like the floor was coming up under me. Don’t know what to do with that. Thought you should be the one holding it, since you’re the reason.
I read it once.
I read it again, which is Joss’s tell, not mine, and I’m furious to find it in my own thumbs a second time.
I read it twice more. I put the phone face-down on my hotel nightstand, because a woman who’s read four times a sentence she’s not going to answer has already lost the argument she’s still pretending to have.
Then I pick it back up.