11. Chapter 11 — Ty
The plates come back Thursday morning.
I type the name into a search bar anyway. Because that's what I do.
Three clicks in, something shifts.
I recognize two of the franchise names immediately. Not because I follow front-office drama. Because I was in the locker room when Dante Rivera's suspension played out this fall.
I watched that situation from twenty feet away. Every day of it.
I know what it looks like when someone decides to make a player into a story.
I sit back. Stare at my screen. This firm doesn't represent teams. It doesn't represent players. What it does is harder to name. Something between consulting and opposition research. The kind of work that lives in the space between what's legal and what's useful.
They build files. That's what they do.
I don't know who the target is yet. But I know that sedan has been parked outside the staff entrance twice in eight days. And I know Ava's laptop was accessed when she wasn't in the room.
I close my laptop. Head to practice.
***
Ruiz has us locked in three weeks out from the playoff opener and the building knows it. Different air. Different footsteps in the hallway. Even the equipment staff moves faster.
I run every route clean.
I'm not performing. I'm not running sharp because Marcus is watching. Though he is, quiet and thorough, the way he watches everything. I'm running sharp because I have something to lose now and my body knows it before my brain finishes the sentence.
Marcus catalogs the change without saying a word. I know he does. That man misses nothing.
After the last whistle Dante claps my shoulder on the way to the tunnel. Quick. Light. The kind of contact that says I see you without saying anything out loud.
I nod once. He keeps walking.
***
The analyst offices are off the main corridor on the second floor. I'm not heading that direction on purpose. That's the story I'm going with.
I pass the glass panel and slow down before I make the decision to slow down.
Ava. At her desk. Headphones in. Absorbed in whatever's on her screen.
She doesn't know I'm here and I can see it.
The controlled posture she carries around the building, that deliberate stillness, it isn't all the way on.
She's tapping her pen against her palm. Not nervous.
Just restless. Like her brain is moving faster than the spreadsheet can keep up and her hands are coping with the gap.
I watch her for exactly three seconds.
Then I keep walking. Because I'm a person who has a system. The system is: keep moving, don't linger at glass panels like a guy who just realized he has absolutely no idea how to handle the next ten weeks of his life.
The system is not working. But I keep walking anyway.
***
I call Wren at seven-fifteen from my couch with the TV on mute and my laptop open to the consulting firm's archived press release.
She picks up on first ring.
"How are you?" she asks. Then, before I answer: "You're not calling to catch up."
"I'm calling to catch up."
"Ty."
"Okay." I close the laptop. "Hypothetically. If you thought someone in a building was being watched. Someone who was looking at things that made the wrong people nervous. How would you play it?"
Silence. Not the polite kind. The kind where someone is already two steps ahead and deciding how much to say.
"I'd want to know the why," she says. "Before I decided anything else. The why is always the story."
"And if you didn't have the why yet?"
"Then I'd find it before I moved. Because moving without the why just tells whoever's watching that you know they're there."
I sit with that. Run it back.
"Okay," I say. "Thanks."
"Ty." Her voice shifts. Just a fraction. "Is this hypothetical?"
"I'm working on it."
She doesn't push. She's figured out the difference between what someone needs to say and what they're ready to say. She gives me the first kind of silence and lets me go.
***
I sit in my apartment for a long time after I hang up.
The why. I have pieces. The firm, the plates, the timestamp on Ava's laptop, the schedule with three circled games sitting on her counter like a signature. The pieces add up to something. I just don't have the center of it yet.
My phone lights up. Unknown number. The same one from the parking structure.
One line.
Do you know what she's sitting on?
I read it twice.
Whoever is parked outside this building, whoever got into her apartment, whoever circled those three games — they know exactly what Ava is looking at. They know about the capstone. They know about the research. They know about her.
Which means she's not collateral.
She's the target.
I put the phone down. Pick it back up. The unknown number is still there on my screen and I don't have anything useful to say to it, so I don't. I open a different contact instead.
The one that just says Ava now, because she renamed herself in my phone somewhere between Cincinnati and last Tuesday.
I type: I found something. I need to tell you. Are you still at the facility?
Three dots appear. Stop. Start again.
Left an hour ago. What did you find?
I look at the window. Think about everything I'd have to explain over text. Think about Wren saying the why is always the story and Ava sitting in her apartment right now, alone with whatever she pulled out of those files tonight, with no idea how far back the people watching her go.
Not over text, I type. Tomorrow. Before practice. I'll find you.
A pause. Longer than usual.
Then: Okay.
One word. But she didn't say no. She didn't say she didn't need it. She just said okay, and from Ava Ruiz that's as close to I'll be there as it gets.
I set the phone down. Stare at the ceiling.
Tomorrow I tell her. All of it — the plates, the firm, the files. Everything I've been sitting on for a week while she's been digging deeper without knowing someone was watching her do it.
She's going to be furious I waited this long.
Good. She should be.