36. Chapter 36 — Ava
Iwake at five-fifteen on my own.
The room is quiet. LA doing its pre-dawn thing outside the glass — lights still moving, the highway still humming. I lie still for a moment.
Not Cincinnati. Not Philadelphia with the alarm already set between us. Just his room, his bed, the weight of his arm across my waist.
I chose to stay. So did he.
I slip out from under his arm — careful, quiet — and cross to the window in my NYU sweatshirt. I don't turn on a light. I just stand there, looking out at the city.
Then he's behind me.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. We watch the city together in the dark, neither of us talking, while LA does that slow shift from dark to gray that doesn't have a name.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
I think about it. I always actually think about questions. He knows that now. He waits for it.
"Ready," I say.
He nods once. Something in his face goes quiet and certain, the way it does when he's decided something and doesn't need to say it out loud.
We stay at the window until the city goes gold.
Then his backup alarm fires. GAME DAY, all caps, the phone screen bright in the dark. He silences it in one motion without looking.
He moves the way he always moves on game day — no stalling, no scrolling, the specific economy of someone whose body already knows the sequence. Gear bag. Phone. The small ritual at the mirror he probably doesn't know he does.
A half-second of something. Then he looks certain.
He crosses back to me. Reaches out and straightens my collar — both hands, smooth, the same gesture I used on him a minute ago. He's grinning when he does it. The full one. No dimmer.
"I have to go," he says.
"I know."
He kisses me once. Brief. Certain. His hand cups the side of my face for exactly one second.
He knows if he stays any longer he won't leave.
"Watch for number eighty-two," he says.
I roll my eyes. "I know your number."
That gets the grin wider. He pulls the door shut behind him.
I stay at the window for a moment. The city is gold now. Valentine's Day morning. His room quiet behind me, the bed still warm on his side.
I pick up my keycard from the nightstand and go two floors up to my own room.
***
I take my time getting ready.
I take my time. The clothes I laid out last night are on the chair — dark trousers, a simple black top, the Empires credential lanyard on the nightstand. Nothing that reads as statement.
Just me, doing my job.
I've been in this credential system since early December. I know every checkpoint at every venue. SoFi Stadium is the last one.
I take a car to the stadium alone.
Los Angeles goes past the window. Palm trees. Wide highway. The particular February light that has no business being this warm.
It doesn't feel like February.
It feels like something out of a movie, the kind where the ending is already decided. The characters are just catching up to it.
I think about the gala.
Three months and a lifetime ago. A woman in a sharp dress calculating the fastest exit. A man who didn't have enough sense to read the room, or too much sense to care.
I threw a cocktail at his chest in front of forty witnesses and thought that was the end of something.
It was the beginning.
I've spent every day since then learning that the talking is the least interesting thing about Ty Knox. Underneath the charming noise is a man who pays attention. Who waits when you need him to wait.
Who walks into the most difficult room of his season and tells the truth when a prepared argument would have served him better.
The stadium appears ahead through the windshield.
SoFi sits in the February morning like something built to hold exactly this much weight. I've been to a lot of venues this season. This one is different.
I show my credential at the first checkpoint. The second. The third.
The field opens up in front of me.
***
I find my section. My seat. The same credential I've used at every road game since early December.
The same sight lines I've learned over months of charters and hotel lobbies and professional distances. I know this view.
The stadium is filling. Nearly a hundred thousand people. The noise is already building — not crowd noise yet, not quite. Something earlier than that. The sound of anticipation becoming physical.
I spot him during warmups.
Number eighty-two, on the far hash, running routes with the focused ease of someone who has run these routes ten thousand times. There's no performance in it. No extra.
Just Ty doing exactly what he's been built to do, in exactly the moment he built himself for.
I watched footage of him last night. Sixteen years old, Friday night Indiana stadium, running a route that looked exactly like the one he's running right now. Same release. Same clean break at the top.
His dad is in Indiana right now. In a bar with the same people from the same town. Watching this.
Ty doesn't know I'm here yet. He will. He always finds me wherever we're at.
Right now he's in the work. I don't need him to look. I know where he is.
***
First half.
The Empires execute. My father's game plan unfolds the way I've watched it unfold on his whiteboard and in his film sessions — patient, structured, each piece placed deliberately. They're not running up the score.
They're building something.
Ty has four catches in the first half. Sixty-two yards. Nothing spectacular on the surface.
But I've watched enough film to know what I'm looking at. He's playing within the system, every route exactly where it needs to be, waiting for the moment the defense gives him what Ruiz designed him to take.
The halftime score is tied.
The person beside me has been on their feet three times in the second quarter. They think I'm a franchise analyst. I am.
I'm also a woman watching the man she loves play the most important game of his life in front of a hundred thousand people. Hands folded in my lap. Face completely neutral.
I stay in my seat during the halftime show.
The performance happens around me. I sit in the middle of it and think about my father.
Two levels down, in the locker room off the tunnel, he's talking to his team. One sentence at a time. His voice cutting through fifty-three men's worth of noise the way it always does.
Level. Unhurried. Thirty years of calm.
He built something in that team. Not just a game plan. A belief that what they've been building all season is worth finishing.
Then the coaches' room. The whiteboard. The adjustments.
I watched him do it from the outside. That's its own kind of education.
I think about tomorrow.
What it looks like when this is over. The capstone presentation is scheduled. The Shore documentation is filed.
Harlan Beck's attorneys are working through a very bad week. My father knows about Ty. Ty's father knows his son is on a Super Bowl field on Valentine's Day.
What's left is just whatever comes next. Ty and me, figuring it out the way we've figured out everything else. Badly at first, then honestly, then well.
The halftime show ends.
The teams take the field.
***
Third quarter.
Ty catches a sixty-one-yard touchdown in the third quarter. I watch him in the end zone with his head tipped back, grinning at the sky like a man who cannot believe his own life. I know that grin.
It's the one he stopped dimming somewhere around Philadelphia.
The stadium is deafening.
I sit completely still in the noise. The particular weight of watching someone arrive at something they've been moving toward their whole life. He earned this.
Not just tonight. Every practice at six in the morning, every film session, every route run a hundred times until it became reflex.
The other team answers. Of course they do. That's the game.
Fourth quarter. Six minutes on the clock.
The Empires are down by four.
I sit forward in my seat. The crowd around me is at a different pitch — not panic, not quite, but close. The kind of noise that happens when a game is exactly this close with exactly this much left to play.
On the sideline I can see my father. He's moving toward the offensive coordinator. Deliberate. Unhurried.
The voice I can't hear from here but know by memory — level, one sentence, moving to the next item.
He's calling something.
I know his red zone package. I've watched the film. I've sat in Ty's hotel room at midnight going through route trees with annotated diagrams.
Asking questions until Ty laughed and said I was going to end up coaching the team myself.
I know the route before Ty lines up at the line of scrimmage.
I'm on my feet before I decide to stand.
The snap.
Ty releases off the line.