CHAPTER SIX
Harrison Ashford summoned Enora to his office three days later, which told her everything about how fast Shania had run to her father once the shouting stopped.
His office occupied the top floor of the stadium's administrative wing, full of dark wood and championship photographs where Jason featured in roughly a third of them.
Jason hoisting a trophy, Jason shaking a senator's hand, Jason kneeling beside a child in a hospital bed with a Cyclones jersey draped over the small shoulders.
Enora had arranged that last one herself, years ago, back when arranging things like that had still felt like devotion instead of labor.
Harrison stood at the window when she came in, sixty-eight years old and built like a man who'd never once doubted a decision in his life.
He didn't turn around right away, which Enora recognized as a power move rehearsed for lesser people than her.
She waited him out, unbothered, studying the skyline he was pretending to admire.
"Enora. Thank you for coming."
"You didn't give me much choice, Harrison."
He turned then, and gestured her into the chair across from his desk—not the good chair, she noted, the one angled slightly lower than his own.
"I'll be direct, since I know you appreciate that.
I'd like to offer you a position. National Alliance board seat, league charity division.
Significant salary, significant visibility.
It would require travel. Extensive travel, actually, at least through the end of the season. "
"Through the ceremony?"
"Through the extension being finalized, yes." He had the decency not to pretend otherwise. "I think it would be good for you. A fresh chapter."
"You mean it would be good for you if I were on a plane to Geneva when my husband's mistresses finish tearing each other apart in the press."
Harrison's face flickered, brief, almost admiring, the look of a man recalculating an opponent's handicap.
"Shania's conduct was a mistake. Youthful indiscretion, poor judgment, I've already spoken to her about it.
And Dr. Morgan's involvement is a personnel matter the organization will handle through the appropriate channels. "
"And Jason's decision to build a life on top of two women he was actively deceiving, while selling himself to your sponsors as the family man who protects what matters? What channel handles that?"
Harrison's jaw clenched. "Jason's extension is worth forty million dollars to this franchise.
His induction sells out a stadium on a night we'd otherwise be playing to half capacity.
I'm not going to pretend that doesn't matter to me, Enora, and I don't think you should pretend it never mattered to you either.
You built a great deal of that value yourself. "
"I did," she agreed. "Which is exactly why I know what it's worth, and exactly why I'm not interested in Geneva."
She left his office without waiting to be dismissed, which she understood, walking out, was probably the first genuinely satisfying thing she'd done in a month.
The leak happened that evening.
Photographs, four of them, grainy and telephoto.
Enora walking up the steps of Gabe's townhouse two weeks earlier, the visit about foundation footage, fifteen minutes, a laptop and a cup of coffee she hadn't finished.
In the photographs, cropped and captioned, it looked like something else entirely.
Cyclones legend's wife seen visiting teammate's home amid marriage trouble, read the first headline. By the time Enora's phone started ringing, Jason had already released a statement.
Deeply hurt.
Committed to my family.
Focused on healing.
His publicist's fingerprints were all over the phrasing, but the speed of it, the readiness, told her something worse: he and Harrison had this drafted before the ink on Shania's leak was even dry. They'd been prepared to make her the villain for months, just in case the real story ever surfaced.
She scrolled through the comments beneath the statement, strangers already deciding she was the fragile, unstable wife who'd driven a good man to seek comfort elsewhere.
She felt her anger settle into a flat, clarifying calm.
They had built a version of her, too, the same way they'd built the protector.
She just hadn't known it existed until it was already circulating.
Jason came home furious, reporters already gathering at the end of the driveway like gulls scenting a dropped sandwich.
He found Enora in the kitchen and got so close she could smell the anger coming off him, metallic, nothing like the cologne from that first terrible night.
"Gabe Navarro. My own coach. In my own house, you humiliated me in front of the entire league—"
"I brought him a laptop, Jason."
"Give me your phone."
"What?"
"Your phone."
He held out his hand, and when she didn't move fast enough he simply took it from the counter, thumbing through it with the practiced entitlement of a man who assumed he was owed it. "Who are you calling. Martin? You're not calling anyone until we control this."
"That's not your phone to take."
"Everything in this house is mine to take," he said, and for the first time in eighteen years she heard, underneath the words, exactly what he meant by it.
She didn't know Maya had slipped out to the pool house and texted Gabe until she heard his truck in the driveway fifteen minutes later.
Jason met him on the front lawn, reporters filming from the street, and demanded he leave.
"Give her back the phone, Jason."
"Get off my property."
"Not until she has her phone."
Jason swung first.
Enora would remember that detail for the rest of her life, the exact half-second before it happened, the way Jason's shoulder dropped like he was still on a football field and Gabe was standing between him and a quarterback.
The punch caught Gabe on the jaw and he staggered but didn't swing back, hands open at his sides, absorbing it.
"Gabe—" Enora ran between them, and Jason's fist, already cocked for a second swing, stopped three inches from her face.
He flinched at that, she'd think later, though it wasn't remorse, just the animal recognition of cameras, thirty feet away, capturing a man who protected his family raising his hand near his wife's face.
"He came here to threaten me," Jason told the reporters twenty minutes later, blood on his knuckles, voice shaking with manufactured outrage. "In front of my daughter. I had to defend my home."
It took the neighbor's doorbell camera less than an hour to circulate, timestamped and unambiguous: Jason swinging first, Gabe's hands never leaving his sides.
Later, after the ambulance that didn't need to come had been waved off and the reporters had thinned to a stubborn few, Enora found Gabe icing his jaw on her back steps.
"You didn't have to come," she said. "I didn't ask you to rescue me.”
"I know." He didn't look up. "Maya asked. And I came because I wanted to, not because I decided you needed it. I should have called you first and let you tell me whether you wanted that instead of just showing up like I got to make that call for you."
"You do that a lot less than he does."
"Doesn't make it right when I do it, though, does it?"
She sat down beside him on the cold concrete step, close enough that their shoulders touched.
Before she'd fully decided to, she kissed him—soft, brief, her hand against his jaw where the bruise was already blooming.
Then she pulled back fast, tears rising without warning, because some part of her still felt married, still felt like she'd betrayed someone by wanting comfort from anyone but him.
Gabe didn't reach for her again. He didn't ask her to explain the tears, or promise they meant something, or tell her she was allowed to move on. He just sat there in the dark, letting her cry next to him, present without asking for a single thing in return.
Somewhere behind them, inside the house, she could hear Jason on the phone with someone, his voice pitched low and urgent, still managing the story instead of sitting with what he'd done.
Maya's light was on upstairs, curtains drawn. Enora made a note to go to her the moment this conversation ended, to make sure her daughter understood none of this was hers to carry.
"I'm not ready for anything," Enora said finally, wiping her face with the heel of her hand. "I need you to know that. Whatever this was."
"I know." Gabe shifted the ice pack, wincing. "I'm not asking you to be ready. I'm just going to keep showing up when Maya calls, and you can keep deciding, every single time, whether that's something you want. That's the whole arrangement. No strings attached."
"That's a strange kind of patience."
"It's the only kind worth having," he said.