12. Maren
Maren
Camila gets her win on a Thursday, and chasing it is how I find the thing that ends my whole understanding of the season.
The win is small and surgical, which is how she works.
In the comms staff meeting she “just wants to make sure we’re aligned” on the reporting cadence, and somewhere in the alignment it comes out that she’s been copied on the front-office distribution for the coaching-transition reports.
My reports. The weekly ones, the one-to-five scale, the ones I’ve been sending up a chain I never looked at because Caden said ownership likes paper and I had eleven fires a day and I believed him, because why wouldn’t I, it’s a form.
“I just figured since I’m supporting the account, I should see what’s going up,” Camila says, friendly as a knife. “Hope that’s okay. Brunner’s office added me last week.”
Brunner’s office. Hal Brunner. The owner.
The man I’ve met exactly twice, both times for ninety seconds, both times in a suite where he shook my hand like he was checking it for a pulse and looked over my shoulder while he did it, already done with me, a man who has never in his life waited for a sentence to finish.
I say of course, great, totally aligned, and I smile, and the meeting ends, and then I go back to my desk and I do the thing I do when something itches that I can’t reach. I dig.
Not into Camila. Into the reports. Into where they go.
It takes an hour, and an access request I probably shouldn't have granted myself.
But I'm senior enough to approve my own permissions, so I do.
Then I comb the comms drive — more reach than I've ever actually needed, and follow my own weekly write-ups up the chain, to see who's been reading the boring little forms I've been feeding the machine since October.
I expect HR. I expect a folder where paperwork goes to die. I expect nothing.
I find a folder called CM TRANSITION, PRIVILEGED, and it is not where paperwork goes to die.
It’s where paperwork goes to get sharpened.
My reports are all in there. Every one. But they’re not alone.
They’re sitting underneath a memo, and the memo is from an outside firm, the team’s employment counsel.
It’s addressed to Brunner and cc’d to Caden.
I read it four times standing up because my legs have stopped being interested in holding me.
I couldn’t recite it back word for word if you made me.
But I’ll never lose the shape of it. Per our discussion re: the Mercer engagement and the performance-based termination provision.
That’s the clause. Make the playoffs or the front office cleans house, except in here it’s not a clause, it’s a provision, and a provision is a thing lawyers build a door out of.
The memo lays out, in clean bloodless paragraphs, how to walk through it.
Maintain contemporaneous, good-faith documentation of coaching performance and organizational fit to support, if necessary, a for-cause pathway that minimizes financial exposure.
Contemporaneous documentation. Good-faith. Coaching performance and organizational fit.
That’s me. That’s my reports. That’s 4, trending up and room cohesion: fragile but intact and every careful honest line I’ve written at my kitchen table at midnight with a glass of wine I wasn’t drinking.
They didn’t want a transition documented.
They wanted a case built. They wanted a paper trail clean enough and sad enough that when the team misses the playoffs, when, the memo says when, not if, the memo has already decided, they can fire the most beloved man in the history of this franchise for cause, pay him nothing, and hand the city a folder of reasons in my handwriting.
I sit down. I have to. The chair’s there or I’d have gone to the floor.
Because here’s the part that takes the air out of me, the part I’ll be living inside for a long time.
I’m not documenting a comeback. I never was.
I’m the knife. They handed me the assignment that looks like the biggest break of my career, the highest-profile account in the building, make him look good, and the whole time the looking-good was the cover and the documentation was the job, and I did the job, I did it beautifully, I’m so good at my job, I’ve been sharpening the thing they’re going to put in his back since the night he broke into my press room and argued with me about a teleprompter.
Caden’s cc’d. That’s the second knife, going in right behind the first. Caden’s on the memo.
My boss, who told me bring it to me first, who told me stop putting my father on a leash like he was protecting him, Caden knows.
Caden has known the whole time what the reports are really for.
He sat across a desk from me and called it a formality, and slid me the template and let me build the case against his own father with a straight face.
I think about the soup. Four days ago. Rhett in my office at nine at night because he noticed I was pale on a plane, asking nothing, just making sure I ate, the most cared-for I’ve ever felt in my life.
And the entire time, sitting in a privileged folder one drive away, was the file with his name on it and my fingerprints all over the handle.
I’m going to be sick. I’m not, but I’m going to be, the body keeps threatening it.
I close the folder. I don’t screenshot it, I don’t forward it, I don’t do anything a smart person whose career is on the line would do, because I’m not thinking about my career for the first time in my adult life.
I’m thinking about a fifty-three-year-old man who already had a building full of people fail to tell him the truth, who already lost a family to the gap between how much they loved him and how little they said, and who is about to lose the second act he came back for to a folder of reasons written by a woman he brought ginger ale.
I open my own sent folder. Twelve weekly reports.
Twelve. I read them with new eyes, and they’re worse than I feared, because they’re good, they’re thorough, they’re exactly what a competent woman building an honest record would write, and every honest word is a brick in a wall they’re going to put him against.
The cursor blinks at me. It’s been blinking at me since the night this started.
This time I know what it wants. It wants the thirteenth report, due Friday, coach demeanor, media readiness, room cohesion, one to five, contemporaneous and good-faith, straight up to Brunner’s privileged little folder where they’re keeping the knives.
I close the laptop without opening the template.
It’s not the first time I’ve left a report unwritten. It’s the first time I’ve done it on purpose, knowing exactly why, choosing him over the chain with my eyes wide open.
***
I don’t go home. I go to Posy’s.
It's a thirty-minute drive to the apartment my sister shares with two other twenty-three-year-olds and a quantity of houseplants that suggests a coping mechanism.
I spend all thirty minutes not crying, which is its own kind of work.
She opens the door in a hoodie that used to be mine, a bowl of cereal in her hand at nine at night, takes one look at my face, puts the cereal down on the radiator, and says, "Okay.
Shoes off. I'm making tea you won't drink. "
This is the thing about Posy. I half-raised her, after our mom checked out, and somewhere in the raising she became the one person on earth I can’t manage.
She sees the version of me under the daylight face the way you can only see it in someone you’ve watched throw up at three a.m. and lie about a grade and cry over a boy who wasn’t worth a single tear.
She makes the tea. She does not ask me what’s wrong, because Posy knows you don’t ask me what’s wrong, you wait, you put a blanket next to me and you wait, and she’s the only person who’s ever figured that out.
I tell her. Not the man part, not yet. The reports.
The folder. The memo with the word when in it.
I tell her I built a case against someone without knowing it and that the someone is good, is decent, doesn’t deserve it, and that I stopped, tonight, I just stopped writing the thing, and that I don’t have a plan, I just have a stomach that won’t sit still.
She listens with her knees pulled up and her chin on them, and when I’m done, she’s quiet for a second, and then she says the thing nobody else would say, because nobody else knows where the soft part is.
“You’re doing the thing,” she says.
“What thing?”
"The thing where someone's about to get hurt and you throw your whole body in front of it and call it a Tuesday — like it's the most ordinary thing in the world." She wraps both hands around her mug. “Mare. I love you. You are the most reliable human being I have ever met, and you have spent your entire life being the wall other people lean on, and I need you to hear me, because I’ve watched you do this since I was nine: there is a version of being good that is just hiding. You disappear into other people’s emergencies, so you never have to sit still long enough to want anything for yourself. And right now, you’re describing torching your career to save a man you keep weirdly not naming, and you’re describing it like it’s a logistics problem. ”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out, which for me is a diagnostic event.
“There it is,” Posy says, gentle, terrible. “Who is he?”
“Pose.”
“Who is he, Maren?”
And because it’s her, because it’s the kitchen where I taught her to make grilled cheese the year everything fell apart, because she’s the one person I have never once been able to spin, I say it.
I say his name. I say the whole shape of it, the bar, the soup, the bridge, the part where I’m twenty-eight and he’s fifty-three, and he’s my boss’s father, and I'm supposed to be protecting the franchise from exactly this, and instead I've quietly gone to war with my own employer to protect a man who has no idea I'm doing it.
Posy doesn’t flinch. That’s the other thing about her. She has never once flinched at the actual me.
“Do you want him?” she says. “Not should you. Not is it smart. I know it’s not smart, you don’t do not-smart, this is the least you I’ve ever seen and I’m kind of obsessed with it. Do you want him?”
“It doesn’t matter what I —”
“Wrong. Wrong answer, that’s the disappearing answer, that’s the answer you give so you don’t have to have the want.
” She leans forward. “You have spent your whole life being needed and calling it love because needed is safe, needed can’t leave you, needed never makes you stand in the open and risk getting picked.
And now there’s a man who, from the sound of it, brought you soup and asked for nothing, which means he wants you, the actual you, not the wall, and it terrifies you so much you’ve reframed the entire thing as a man you have to rescue.
Because rescuing him you know how to do.
Wanting him back, out loud, letting him want you, that’s the thing you’ve never once let yourself have. ”
I’m crying now. In my sister’s kitchen, over tea I’m not drinking, exactly as predicted.
“You’re allowed to want things for yourself,” Posy says, and her voice cracks a little because she means it all the way down.
“I know nobody ever told you that. I know you were too busy telling me. So I’m telling you.
You’re allowed. Even him. Even this. Even if it’s a disaster.
You’re allowed to want it instead of just managing it. ”
I put my forehead on the table. She puts her hand on the back of my neck, the way I used to do for her, and we sit there in the bad kitchen light, and I let myself, for about ninety seconds, not be the wall.
When I drive home, I understand two things I didn’t when I left work. The first is that I’m going to protect him, all the way, whatever it costs, and that’s not actually the brave thing. Posy’s right, that’s the thing I already know how to do.
The second is the brave thing, and it scares me more than the folder did.
I want him. Not to save him. To have him.
For me. Eyes open. And I am the only person in this building who can see the knife coming, which means I’m the dangerous one now, and for the first time in my life I think I might be done apologizing for it.