23. Rhett
Rhett
Three days after the gala, I watch the fear take her over completely, and I finally understand that whatever she’s carrying is bigger than us.
We win two more. Thirteen and ten, and the playoff picture Brunner doesn’t want to exist is taking shape anyway, the building loud again, the city back in love.
I should be happy. I am happy, in the parts of me that get to look at the standings.
But the parts of me that look at Maren are watching something come apart in slow motion, and I don’t have the information to stop it, which for a man who reads rooms for a living is its own particular hell.
She’s frightened. Not gala-frightened, not caught-in-a-coat-room frightened.
Something underneath. She flinches when her phone buzzes.
She’s started looking at Camila the way you look at weather coming over the lake, and she’s stopped sleeping; I can see it, the way I see everything about her, the bruised look under the makeup she’s gotten too good at applying.
Twice this week she’s started a sentence with Rhett, I have to tell you something and twice she’s swallowed it, and the swallowing is killing her, I can see that too.
Whatever it is, it’s eating her alive while she protects me from it, but I have spent my whole life on the other side of that, the man being protected from the truth by people who loved him, and I hated it, and I won’t be that man to her.
There’s a thing I notice that week that I file under nothing, because I want it to be nothing.
Camila stops being friendly to Maren. Not hostile, worse than hostile, careful, the way you get careful around a thing you’ve already decided to do something to.
She starts cc’ing people on emails she used to keep between them.
She’s at her desk before Maren and after, and twice I catch her coming out of the comms server room with a tablet held against her chest like a hand of cards.
I’ve watched young players this hungry, the ones who’d cut a teammate’s hamstring to make the roster and smile doing it.
I should say something to Maren. I tell myself Maren sees everything, Maren doesn’t need my help.
I tell myself that because the alternative is admitting I see the storm coming and I’m doing what I’ve always done, which is coach the game in front of me and trust the people I love to survive the one I’m not watching.
It comes to a head on a Thursday, in my office, late.
She comes in with no pretense of a stat sheet, and she shuts the door, and she’s white the way she was in the front office at the deadline, and she says, “Camila’s been in the shared drive.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not okay. She’s been in places she has no business being, pulling files, and she’s smart, Rhett, she’s so much smarter than people give her credit for, and she’s been watching us since November, and she has enough now.
Not proof of us, maybe. But enough. Enough to start asking questions that, once they’re asked out loud in this building, can’t be un-asked.
” Her hands are shaking. She notices me notice, and she folds them.
“We’re out of time. The thing I’ve been telling myself I had time to handle, I don’t.
The walls are paper now. If this comes out the wrong way, from the wrong person, in the wrong order, it ends you. Not me. You.”
“Maren.” I come around the desk. “Slow down. Tell me what’s going on. You’ve been getting to the edge of it for weeks and I’m telling you, whatever it is, I would rather have it tonight than keep watching it eat you.”
And she almost does. She gets the closest she’s ever gotten, her mouth open, her eyes wet, the whole truth right there at the surface, and then she shakes her head, hard, like she’s arguing with herself, and she says, “Not like this. Not in your office at eleven at night with Camila forty feet away and the door unlocked. I’m not going to tell you the most important thing I’ll ever tell you in a place where we could be interrupted.
I’ve waited too long to do it badly.” She takes a breath.
“But I know how it starts. It starts with you telling Caden. About us. You wanted to, you said two weeks, but we don’t have two weeks anymore, Camila took them.
Do it now. Tomorrow. First thing. Get ahead of her.
Tell your son the truth about us from your own mouth before he hears a version of it from someone building a case, because the only thing that survives this is if it comes from you, clean, before it comes from anyone else, dirty. ”
“You wanted me to wait.”
“I was wrong to. I was protecting the timing and the timing’s gone.
” She looks at me, and there’s something enormous and unsaid sitting behind her eyes, a grief that doesn’t match the conversation we’re having out loud.
“Tell Caden tomorrow. And then tomorrow night, after, when it’s done and it’s quiet, I’m going to tell you my thing.
The big one. The one I keep swallowing. I’ll tell you all of it, Rhett, I swear to God, tomorrow night, and you’re going to find out whether you meant what you said about loving the useless human middle of me.
But you go first. You tell Caden first. Promise me that order. You, then me. Tomorrow.”
I should push. Every instinct I’ve got says the thing she’s holding is the load-bearing one, the thing the whole season’s actually about, and that I should not let her walk out of this office holding it one more night.
But she’s looking at me like a woman who’s finally, finally ready to set something down, and who just needs one more day to do it without dropping it, and I have spent thirty years pushing people for the truth on my schedule instead of letting them give it to me on theirs.
So I do the thing I never do. I let her keep it one more night.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “I tell Caden first thing. To his face. Everything about us, from me.” I take her shaking hands and I hold them still in mine. “And tomorrow night you tell me yours, and whatever it is, Maren, I already know the shape of you. The thing inside the shape doesn’t scare me.”
“It should.” She says it so quietly I almost miss it. “But I love you for saying it doesn’t.”
It’s the first time she’s said it. I love you.
All season, all the foxholes and the bridges and the bed, and she’s never once said the words, she gives me everything but the words, and now she says them in my office at eleven at night looking like a woman at a funeral, like the words cost her something, like she’s saying them now because she’s afraid she won’t get a clean chance to.
“Say it again,” I tell her. “The way you’d say it if you weren’t scared.”
She almost laughs. Almost cries. Gets up on her toes and kisses me once, soft, final in a way I don’t like, and says it into my mouth: “I love you. Tomorrow. You first, then me. Promise me the order.”
“I promise.”
I’d promise her anything, standing in this office.
Every instinct I’ve got is still telling me not to let her walk out holding the big thing one more night, but she needs the one day, and I’ve spent thirty years taking the truth from people on my schedule instead of letting them hand it to me on theirs, and I’m not going to do it to her.
She leaves my office at eleven-twenty. I watch her go and I feel, God help me, relieved. Like we have a plan. Like tomorrow is a thing we’ve been handed.
Nobody’s handed tomorrow. A man my age, a man with this knee, knows that better than most. But a woman just said I love you and tomorrow in the same breath, in the dark, in the office where I first refused to read her cards, and I want to believe both so badly that I do.
I drive home. I sleep. I let myself assume, for one whole night, that I’ll get to finish this the right way, in the right order, on the schedule I promised her.