10. Chapter 10 — Ava
The plane's wifi reconnects somewhere over Pennsylvania.
My phone buzzes once. I'm already looking at the screen.
New email. Empires staff address I don't recognize.
No signature.
I read it twice. Lock my screen.
Around me the plane is loud. Win energy has its own physics. I keep my face neutral and look out the window at the dark.
Here's the thing about anonymous tips.
Either the sender doesn't know how far I've gotten. Or they know exactly, and they want me to think they don't.
I don't open the email again until I'm home with the door locked behind me.
***
That was Sunday.
By Thursday I've run the insurance rider data four times.
The pattern is worse than I first thought. Shore's decisions over the past two seasons form a clean, consistent picture when you know what to look for.
Franchise liability shifted away from player injury claims. Mid-tier contract structures quietly disadvantaged. Moves that don't read as malicious in isolation.
Just policy. Just management. Just one GM making calls.
Except the calls all point the same direction.
Toward the front office accumulating power. Away from the coaching staff.
Away from my father.
Not illegal. That's the part that keeps stopping me. Nothing in here would hold up as fraud.
But deliberate — yes. Every single move, deliberate.
I close my laptop at two in the morning. Sit in the quiet. Think about the anonymous email pointing me toward what I'd already found.
Either they're helping me.
Or they're building a case around me.
I schedule a call with Claire Osei at the players' union for Friday morning. Framed as a capstone consultation. Routine. Nothing that would flag internally.
***
Thursday evening, eight-fifteen.
I'm in my office, building nearly empty, going through archived injury data when there's a knock at the open door.
Ty. Holding a phone charger. Looking like a man who rehearsed a cover story and is disappointed by his own lack of creativity.
"Borrowed this from the analyst bay," he says. "Returning it."
The analyst bay closes at five. We both know the charger is a fiction.
"Put it on the desk."
He does. Then he leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. Watching me with the look he gets when he's been working up to something.
"You okay?"
"I'm working."
"You've been working since six."
"So have you."
"I like it here." Simple. Like a fact. "The building's better when it's quiet."
I look at him. He doesn't move.
I close the financial model. Not because I'm inviting him in. Just because I'm tired of the numbers and he's standing there.
Sometimes the body makes a call before the brain approves it.
"Sit down or leave," I say. "Don't hover."
He sits.
***
We talk for two hours.
Not about the files. Not about Cincinnati. Not about the agreement that is technically holding and practically isn't.
He tells me about arriving in Manhattan. First night in the city, twenty-two years old, Times Square at midnight. Duffel bag still over one shoulder.
Enormous and invisible at the same time.
"I called my mom," he says. "From the middle of the sidewalk. Like a tourist. Which I was."
"What did she say?"
"She said the city would figure me out eventually." He pauses. "I think she meant it as a compliment."
"It might not have been."
He laughs. The real one. Quick and open and gone before I finish processing it.
I tell him about my sisters. Being the youngest by four years. Staying in on Friday nights while everyone else went to games.
Not because anyone told me to. Because the library was quieter. Because the books didn't ask me whose daughter I was before they let me in.
"You like quiet," he says.
"I like things that don't require me to explain myself."
He's quiet for a moment.
"Is that what I am?" His voice is light. The question underneath it isn't. "Something you have to explain?"
I don't answer right away.
"You're something I didn't account for," I say.
He looks at me with the expression he doesn't show in public. Not the charm, not the grin. The one underneath.
The one that surfaces when he stops performing.
"Yeah," he says. "Same."
***
He leaves at ten-fifteen.
He doesn't touch me. Just stands in the doorway and says goodnight, Ruiz in a voice that does more damage than his hands would have.
Then he's gone.
I sit in the chair for a moment. The building is empty and quiet and still carrying the shape of a conversation I didn't plan to have.
I think about Times Square. About a duffel bag and a sidewalk and a kid calling his mother because the city was too big.
I think about how I've spent three months watching Ty Knox perform for every room he walks into — and how tonight he just didn't. How the two hours passed without either of us managing it.
I'm not sure what to do with that.
So I do what I always do. I pack up my laptop. Turn off the lamp. Let the night air hit me when I push through the side exit.
It's cold. Sharp. Good.
I take the long way to the subway.
***
I get home at eleven.
The building door opens fine. The elevator is slow. I find my keys, turn the deadbolt, push inside.
The apartment is dark.
Everything looks right. Nothing is moved. I stand in the doorway and run the inventory — couch, table, the stack of Stern binders on the kitchen counter, the mug I left on the —
I stop.
Kitchen counter.
There's something next to the mug that wasn't there this morning.
I cross the room. Don't turn on the overhead light. Use my phone.
An NYC Empires game schedule. This season's. The laminated pocket version they hand out at the facility.
Three away games circled in red ink.
I look at it for a long time without touching it.
The door was locked. I know it was locked. I'm careful about the door, about everything.
Key fob entry. Front desk. Logged visitors. Someone still got in here and left this on my counter.
Cincinnati. Philadelphia. And a third date, six weeks from now.
I photograph it. Pick it up with a dish towel, seal it in a ziplock bag, drop it in my work tote.
My hands are steady.
That's the thing my father always said. Keep your hands steady. The room reads your hands.
I sit on the couch in the dark.
The email. The file access. The unknown voice on Ty's phone. And now this.
Someone is watching both of us.
I open my messages. Ty's contact name is still Knox — plain, professional, exactly enough.
I need to show you something tomorrow. It's not about the files. It's about my apartment.
The response comes back in forty-five seconds.
What happened.
Not a question.
I look at the ziplock bag in my tote.
Someone was here. Nothing taken. But they were here.
Three dots. Then: Are you safe right now?
He doesn't ask what they took. Doesn't ask what they wanted. Doesn't ask what it means for the investigation.
He asks if I'm safe.
I don't know, I type. That's the problem.
Three dots. Then: Okay.
I put the phone down.
I've been careful my whole life. And someone still walked through my door. Left a message on my counter.
The message is simple: we know where you live.
My father is the most feared coach in football. I grew up watching what that weight does to people. Watching them decide whether to carry it or put it down.
Ty has known the cost since the night Marcus said my name at the gala.
He keeps showing up anyway.
I look at the ziplock bag on the counter. Look at the three circled dates inside it.
Then I turn off the light and sit in the dark and think.