32. Chapter 32 — Ava
The counter-narrative is moving by noon.
I know because Wren texts me a link at eleven fifty-eight with two words: Watch this. I click it from the hotel bed, still in yesterday's clothes, coffee going cold on the nightstand. The headline isn't the hotel photo.
It's Harlan Beck's name in twenty-four-point font next to the words coordinated franchise sabotage.
My phone hasn't stopped buzzing since seven this morning. I've read approximately none of it.
I should feel something cleaner than this. Relief, maybe. The satisfaction of a case built correctly, disclosed correctly, landing exactly where it was supposed to.
I know the shape of what that's supposed to feel like.
What I actually feel is tired. Specifically tired, not generally tired. The kind that lives behind your eyes.
By one-thirty, Beck's name is the top result when you search the NYC Empires. By two, three different sports outlets have picked up Claire's union filing.
I set the phone face down on the bed. Stare at the ceiling.
***
Wren knocks at three-thirty.
She comes in without ceremony, drops her bag on the chair, and sits on the edge of the desk. She has that specific stillness she gets when she's already worked through the thing she's about to tell you.
"I know who the tipster was," she says.
I look at her.
"Shore's assistant. She had access to Shore's files on Ty, the consulting firm's dossier ran through Shore's office, which is where she got the father/league-office material.
" Her voice is flat. Factual. "She sent the three-AM email.
She used a burner to warn Ty. She hired someone to deliver the message about his father and the league office. "
I process that for a moment. "She was inside Shore's operation."
"From the beginning." Wren picks up her phone, checks something, sets it back down. "She could see which way it was going. She wanted to be on the right side when it landed."
"Self-preservation," I say.
"Completely." She looks at me directly. "She's already resigned. Quietly. She won't face any consequences — she helped bring it down, even if that was never the point."
A pause. "You should know it wasn't loyalty. It was calculation."
I sit with that.
The three-AM email in a Cincinnati hotel room. Waking up to it, reading it twice, locking my screen. The warnings that came to Ty.
All of it — self-interest dressed as something else, pointing us exactly where we needed to go anyway.
"It doesn't matter why," I say finally. "It still pointed us in the right direction."
Wren tries to smile. It gets about halfway there. "That's a very practical way to look at it."
"I'm a Stern MBA candidate," I say. "I'm always practical."
She actually smiles at that. Then she picks up her bag and stands. "Beck's attorney released a statement at two-fifteen. It's going to make tomorrow worse before it makes it better."
She's already moving toward the door. "Don't read the comments."
"I wasn't going to read the comments."
"Everyone says that." She pulls the door open. "Drink some water, Ava."
She's gone before I can respond.
***
Four in the afternoon. Los Angeles doing what Los Angeles does — sun coming through the curtains at an angle that has no business being this warm in February.
I sit on the edge of the hotel bed and try to take stock.
I grew up careful. Not sheltered — careful. There's a difference.
I learned the cost of carelessness early, growing up inside a franchise where everyone's choices lived in public. I built something deliberately, specifically mine: four years at NYU, two more at Stern, a capstone that no one could dismiss as a favor from my father's name.
Now my name is in every sports headline in the country next to a blurry hotel corridor photo.
I pick up my phone. Read three messages from Gabriela. Two from my sister Pilar in Miami, who has sent me a gif of a woman looking unbothered and a voice note I can hear is long.
One from my father, sent this morning at six forty-seven: Call me when you're ready. No rush.
I put it back down.
I think about the gala. Eleven weeks ago. A man crossing the room like he owned the floor between us, grinning at everything, not a self-conscious bone in his body.
I decided before he reached me that he wasn't worth the energy.
I think about the coffee on my desk on my first day. I pay attention.
I think about him in the corridor after Shore's meeting — reading the whole situation in four seconds, falling into step beside me like it was nothing. The way he sat in a hotel chair in Cincinnati with his elbows on his knees and asked the right questions about insurance riders at midnight.
The sticky note on his phone. Stay out of my way. The cocktail glass I drew beside it because I couldn't stop myself.
The parking structure. Philadelphia. Minneapolis. His face when I set the terms in Cincinnati and he agreed. Said plainly that he was agreeing because I asked him to, not because he thought it was right.
What do you need. Every time. Before anything else.
My phone buzzes.
Gabriela: Are you okay?
I stare at the ceiling for a moment. Then I type back: Yeah.
She calls immediately.
"You okay?" she says, because she doesn't trust text answers from me. She never has.
"Yeah," I say again. "I mean it."
"He's all over the news." A pause. I can hear her trying to read my voice. "Is he worth it?"
I think about a man who walked into my father's office with nothing prepared and came out the other side having told the truth about Indiana for an hour. Who showed up at doors. Who asked what I needed before he asked anything else.
"Yeah," I say. "He really is."
Gabriela is quiet for two seconds. Then: "Good. Now please eat something."
"I had coffee."
"Ava."
"Okay, fine."
She hangs up. I'm still almost smiling when my phone buzzes again.
Ty: Press figured out what floor I'm on. Coming to you. Which room?
I laugh out loud. Alone in a hotel room in Los Angeles. Genuinely, the real one.
I type back: You could have led with that.
Three dots.
I was being polite.
I text him the room number. Then I get up, splash water on my face, and pull the room service tray from the cart by the window. Coffee still warm, which feels like a minor miracle given the day.
He knocks four minutes later.
I open the door and he looks — there's no other word for it — clarified. Like the last twenty-four hours burned something off and what's underneath is cleaner. He's in a team pullover and jeans, hair doing the thing it does when he's been running his hands through it.
I hold out the coffee from the room service tray.
He takes it. Sits on the edge of the bed.
I sit in the desk chair and pull my feet up. We look at each other for a moment — the particular quiet of two people who have been inside something enormous and are only now standing on the other side of it.
"So," he says. "Super Bowl in four days."
I look at him. His face is open. The full version, no dimmer. It's still the thing I can't entirely prepare for.
"Super Bowl in four days," I say.
He takes a sip of coffee. Sets it on the nightstand. Leans back on his hands and looks at the ceiling for a moment, then back at me.
"Beck's attorney is going to keep talking," I say. "Tomorrow is going to be loud."
"I know."
"The photo isn't going away."
"I know." He looks at me directly. "Does that bother you?"
I think about it honestly. About what I spent twenty-three years being careful for. About the specific cost of carelessness in my father's world.
About the fact that I threw that drink at the gala and haven't been careful since.
"No," I say. And mean it.
He nods. Not surprised. Just — receiving it.
"Wren told me who the tipster was," I say.
"Shore's assistant."
"You knew?"
"She figured it out this morning. Texted me at the same time." He looks at the carpet. "Self-preservation."
"That's what I said."
"Doesn't matter why," he says. "It worked."
I look at him. "That's exactly what I said."
He grins. Not the performed one. The real one, slow and private, like something good surprised him. "See," he says. "Practical."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying—"
"I know what you're saying."
He's still smiling. I look out the window at the LA skyline going gold in the late afternoon light. In four days there's a Super Bowl. In a few weeks there's a capstone presentation at Stern.
After that — whatever comes after. We'll figure it out the way we've figured out everything else.
Badly at first. Then honestly. Then well.
"Come here," he says.
I look at him. He's held out one hand. Simple. No performance in it.
I uncurl from the desk chair. Cross to the bed. Sit beside him.
He doesn't say anything. Just puts his arm around me. I lean into his side and we look at the window together.
It's quiet. The real kind.
Four days.