Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hamish
The cry blazes through my right ear like a flare in the dark.
Thin. Furious. Alive.
My hands freeze on the desk. My lungs forget how to work.
The match is playing on the monitors and Roshani is mid-sentence and Malcolm is muttering about camera angles in my left ear and none of it matters, none of it exists, because through the earpiece Gemma rigged to my phone, through three thousand miles of signal and satellite and undersea cable, I can hear my child's first breath.
My child.
The sound rewires me. Every cell. Every priority I've held in place for the last hour—the ratings, the performance, the contract, the career—falls away like scaffolding from a building that no longer needs it. What's left is simple and enormous and older than language.
My child is born and alive. My wife did it.
And I wasn't there.
My eyes fill. On live television, in front of cameras that cost more than my first flat, my vision blurs and my throat closes. The tears come before I can stop them.
I don't try to stop them.
"Ma God," I say, and my voice breaks clean in half. Snapped into a before and an after. "I love ye through every universe and back again."
Roshani gives me a look and says, "That's—that's quite a lot of devotion for the forward we're watching, Hamish. Are you two mates?"
Through the right earpiece, Mum's voice: "He's perfect, Amy."
And Amy's: "What do you mean, he?"
"The McCormick ultrasound curse has held, hen. Ye canna name this beautiful wee boy Bronwyn."
A boy. I have a son.
Son.
The word detonates inside my chest. Roshani is watching me with an expression that says she knows something enormous is happening but can't name it.
"What is happening?" Malcolm snaps in my left ear. "You sound like you're in love with the forward on screen, for fuck's sake. And if you are, not judging, but this is no time to come out of the closet."
I pull the left earpiece out and set it on the desk. Malcolm's voice becomes a tinny buzz I can no longer hear. The floor director stares at me. The red light on camera two is steady and pointed directly at my face.
I look into it.
"I need ta tell viewers the truth."
The studio goes still. Not quiet—the equipment hums, the monitors flicker—but the humans in the room stop. Every runner, every staffer, every engineer. Roshani turns to me with an expression I've never seen on a broadcaster.
Open. Waiting. Unscripted.
"I have two earpieces in. For the last hour, I've been commentating on this match wi' one ear while my wife was in labour on a video call in the other.
A colleague rigged the connection so I could be there.
Ma dear wife Amy just delivered our first child on the floor of our living room in Boston.
It's an emergency birth, the paramedics blocked by traffic.
The bairn is four weeks early, and thanks be to God, he's screaming and crying so far.
Ma mum and ma mother-in-law happened ta be there when ma wife's water broke.
They delivered him. Two grandmothers, no medical team, on a shower curtain on the floor.
They're waitin' fer an ambulance right now, seconds ticking by. "
The silence is total.
"I tried ta leave when I found out. Ma producer, Malcolm Rees, told me I'd be in breach of contract if I left, that I'd owe the network millions.
That my career would be over and he'd ruin me forever.
" A pause. "So I stayed, and I tried ta do both.
And I want everyone watching ta know what that cost is, and who made me pay it. "
Through the glass of the production gallery, Malcolm is on his feet, clipboard in hand, making chopping motions at the camera ops—cut the feed, cut the feed—but no one moves. The camera ops look at him. They look at me.
They stay on me.
Malcolm turns to Roshani. He's jabbing his finger through the glass, mouthing: Say something, deny it, redirect, STOP HIM!
Roshani looks at Malcolm through the glass. She looks at me. And then she does something that will end up in every journalism textbook written in the next decade.
She leans back in her chair, folds her hands, and cedes the floor.
"Take your time, Hamish," she says. On air. To millions.
Malcolm's face goes the color of raw liver.
I breathe. I look into the camera.
"I grew up in Glasgow. One of eight. Ma mum, Fiona, is the toughest woman I've ever known. She raised all of us on no' enough money and too much love and the absolute conviction that every single one of her children was gonna amount to something, even when the evidence was no' exactly compelling."
A laugh ripples through the studio.
"Ma da, Fergus, taught me the value of hard work. And how ta play darts. He honed that skill over many, many pints, and he'll tell ye it's a lifelong talent, more useful than anything I ever did on a pitch."
My voice steadies. The tears are still there, but they're not falling. They're fuel.
"Being good at football came easy ta me. But luck doesna take ye from good ta world-class. The support of people who love ye when ye're brilliant and love ye exactly the same when ye're rubbish—that's what took me from a lad kickin' a ball in a car park ta the pitch at Wembley."
"I want ta continue that tradition. Ma own child—ma son—will carry that love inta the next generation.
And I want him ta ken that when the moment came, when the choice was between ma own instincts and a contract and a career—I chose ma family.
I chose them. If at all possible, I will always choose them. "
The analytics staffer's voice, low and urgent: "We've gone viral. Trending worldwide in fourteen countries. Viewership is—the numbers aren't loading. The servers are overwhelmed."
Another staffer: "The network's phone lines are jammed. Switchboard is down."
"We're being picked up by international feeds. CNN, BBC, NHK, Al Jazeera. Over a billion worldwide."
A billion people watching me cry on television because my wife just had our baby on a damn shower curtain in the floor of our home and my boss wouldn't let me go home.
Another staffer, quieter: "Malcolm's getting death threats on social media. His name is trending, and not in a good way."
"The hashtag is #LetHamishGoHome. Two million posts."
Through the gallery glass, Malcolm has gone very still. His clipboard is at his side. His chopping motions have ceased. He looks like a man standing on the pavement, watching his house burn down.
Good.
Not that I want the man dead. But I do want him to see that "less banter" and "I'll ruin you" take their toll, and my transparency about what he's done will take its toll, too.
I'm still looking into the camera when the monitor to my left flickers. The broadcast feed shows my face, but ghosted in the corner, there's another image. A living room floor.
And on it, my wife.
Gemma's rig. The video call from my phone under the desk has bridged to the broadcast feed—whether she did it on purpose or the signal bled through, I don't know and I don't care. For a few seconds, the world sees what I've been watching under this desk for the last hour.
Amy. On the floor of our condo. Flushed, sweating, radiant, alive. Mum's hands on her shoulders, until she grabs a towel and throws it across Amy's bare bottom half. Marie beside her, wild-eyed. And in Amy's arms, wrapped in a white towel, so small the camera barely picks up the shape—our baby.
The studio is so devoid of sound, it makes my eardrums ache. A hundred people holding their breath at the same time.
"Hi, wee one," I say, looking at the monitor, at my child, at the woman who just delivered our baby with two grandmothers, no epidural, and God help me, no husband. "I'm yer da. I'm comin' home ta ye as fast as I can."
Amy's voice comes through the speaker, thin and exhausted and sharp with steel underneath. "Hamish."
"I'm here, pet."
"Come home now. Forget the job. Forget the breach of contract and the penalties. We can find a way to pay it all back, but we can't get these moments ever again. Please come home. We need you. You belong here—"
The feed cuts out. Her phone battery, dead. Just like me.
I'm already reaching for my earpiece when Gemma hands me a note.
Your uncle just called the studio line—James McCormick—says you need to read this on air.
She holds up her phone. A text message, long, filling the screen.
I read the first few sentences, then lean into the camera.
"I've just received a message from my uncle, James McCormick, of Anterdec Holdings.
" I glance at Gemma's phone and work hard to scrub out the confusion from my broadcasting voice.
"He's arranged for a helicopter ta take me from the roof of this building ta a private jet that will get me back ta Boston in six hours. "
My voice cracks again, and I let it. "Thank ye, Uncle James."
I squint at the screen. There's more.
"And... I'm supposed ta read the rest. 'Anterdec Holdings owns the Crestmoor Collection, a group of family-friendly resorts. Hamish and Amy McCormick and their new baby will serve as the official brand spokespersons for—'"
I stop reading. Close my eyes. Crack my neck the way I used to on the pitch when a referee made a call so bad, it bordered on criminal.
Of course.
Of course Uncle James has turned the most emotional moment of my life into a branding opportunity. The man has never seen a human experience he couldn't monetize.
But he's also put a helicopter on a roof for me and a private jet at the ready so I can be with Amy and the baby in six hours. Whatever else James McCormick is—ruthless, calculating, a man who measures love in quarterly returns—he's family.
And family, in the McCormick tradition, means ye show up. Even if ye invoice for the travel by making your nephew work it off in flesh.
I open my eyes.
"—for the Crestmoor resorts," I finish. And then a thought arrives, clean, sharp, and fully formed. Perhaps I have learned more than I realized from my uncle.