10. Shadows Gathering
SHADOWS GATHERING
LEO
Ihad grown accustomed to being watched. Fifteen years of professional football will do that to a man.
But the particular way that I was being watched on the Tuesday morning after the beach had a different quality. More personal. Less interested in the player and more interested in the man.
I noticed the photographer at the training facility first — a young man with a long lens, parked just outside the gates, adjusting his equipment with the patience of someone who’d been tipped off about something worth waiting for.
When I drove out at noon, he followed at a careful distance for three blocks before apparently losing me at a red light.
I didn’t think much of it. This happened. It was part of the life. I stopped at a payphone and called Hunter.
“Tell me you’re not calling to cancel dinner,” Hunter said by way of greeting.
“I’m not canceling dinner. I’m asking if you’ve seen anything in the press.”
A beat. “Define anything.”
I waited.
“Okay,” Hunter said. “Yes. There are a few items. Nothing major yet — one of the gossip columns noticed you coming out of the library three Thursdays running, and someone connected it to the English conversation club. A photographer caught you and Estrella at an ice cream place. And...”
“And?”
“There’s a shot from what looks like that cultural night at the library. The one with the lights in the trees. You two are dancing.”
I closed my eyes briefly. The dancing. Of course. The dancing had not been subtle. I was aware of this at the time and had chosen not to care, which was a decision I stood behind and which was currently becoming complicated.
“How bad?” I asked.
“It’s not bad bad. It’s... warm. Honestly, Leo, you look like a man in a film poster. The photo is quite flattering.” A pause. “For both of you.”
“That’s not the problem.”
“No,” Hunter agreed, his tone shifting. “The problem is that it’s only a matter of time before someone with a bigger platform picks it up.
Her agent’s already put out a small statement — Estrella is focused on her American film debut and any friendship with Mr. Ramirez is exactly that. A friendship.”
“He put out a statement without telling her?” My voice came out sharper than intended.
“I don’t know his process. I’m telling you what’s out there.” Hunter paused. “Leo. I need you to think about what you want here. The Aztecs are still negotiating your contract. The optics of a relationship with a woman who has complicated exes and a custody situation —”
“Hunter.”
“I’m just —“
“Stop.”
Silence. Then Hunter exhaled. “Okay. Stopping.”
“I need to call Estrella.”
“Yes,” Hunter said. “You probably do.”
I hung up. Found another coin. Dialled her number — I had it memorized by now, which was not a thing I had consciously decided to do and which told me something useful about the state of affairs.
She answered on the second ring, her voice slightly strained. “I was going to call you.”
“You’ve seen it,” I said.
“Miguel came by this morning with the papers. The dancing photograph is very...” She paused. “It’s a beautiful photograph, actually. That’s the irritating part. It would be easier to be angry if we looked ridiculous.”
Despite everything, I laughed. “We definitely don’t look ridiculous.”
“No,” she agreed, softly. “We don’t.” Another pause. “Roberto called this morning.”
Roberto. Luz’s father. The name landed with a particular weight.
“What did he say?”
“Nothing specific yet. He said he had seen some things in the papers and wanted to ‘reconnect.’” She made the word sound like something she’d found under a rock. “He is filming here in Los Angeles. He wants to see Luz.”
“Has he been in contact before? With Luz, I mean.”
“He calls occasionally. Luz knows he exists, loves him the way children love absent parents — completely and without the sense to wonder why they don’t show up.” Her voice was careful, even. The voice of a woman who had practiced not letting this hurt her. “She deserves better than that.”
“She has better than that,” I said, before I could think twice about it.
Estrella was quiet for a moment. “Leo.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” Her voice was different now — quieter, and something in it made my chest tighten. “That’s what frightens me a little. How much I’ve started to believe you.”
I stood in the warm Los Angeles afternoon, the payphone receiver warm against my ear, and I thought about what to say. In my career, I had been trained to think three moves ahead. To anticipate. To position.
“Estrella,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You don’t know what’s coming,” she said, gently. “Neither do I.”
“No. But I know where I want to be when it gets here.” I heard her breathing. “Can I come for dinner? I’d like to be in the same room as you when we figure out what ‘here’ looks like.”
A pause. Then: “Come for dinner. I’ll make enchiladas. The children have been asking for them anyway.”
“I’ll bring the wine.”
“And maybe some patience,” she said. “Roberto tends to make me less charming.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I said. “But I’ll bring patience too.”
The enchiladas were extraordinary. This was not a surprise — I had learned that Estrella approached cooking the way she approached everything else she cared about, with complete commitment and a refusal to do it halfway.
What was a surprise was Luz.
She arrived at the dinner table having apparently spent the afternoon in intensive study of napkin folding, and she was determined to share her findings. She had a napkin in hand before I had even sat down.
“This one is the bishop’s hat,” she said, presenting it to me with the gravity of a professor delivering a keynote. “You have to do the corners first or it doesn’t work. Leo, you try.”
I tried. The napkin did not become a bishop’s hat. It became something that might generously be described as a defeated envelope.
“You went too fast on the second fold,” Luz said, with the patience of someone who had expected this outcome. She unfolded it and handed it back. “Again.”
Across the table, Estrella pressed her lips together very firmly and became extremely interested in serving the enchiladas.
My second attempt produced something slightly more architectural. Luz examined it with professional detachment. “Better,” she allowed. “We’ll work on it.”
Pedro, who had arranged his entire fleet of toy cars along the edge of the table in a starting grid of his own design, looked up from this project long enough to assess my napkin. “It looks like a frog,” he said helpfully, and returned to his cars.
“It’s a bishop’s hat,” Luz told him.
“Frogs are also good,” I offered.
Pedro considered this. “Leo, you have to do the race commentary. Mami doesn’t do the voices right.”
“Pedro, I do the voices perfectly,” Estrella said.
“You make them all sound like you,” Pedro explained, with the diplomatic honesty of a four-year-old. He pointed at the red car at the front of the grid. “This one is from Spain. He sounds different.”
Estrella met my eyes across the table. Her expression was caught somewhere between wounded and laughing.
“He’s right,” I said, carefully. “The Spanish cars do sound different.”
“Thank you,” Pedro said, vindicated. He pushed the red car forward an inch. “Ready? Three, two —”
“Eat first,” Estrella said. “Race after.”
Pedro accepted this with the long-suffering patience of someone who has learned which negotiations are winnable. He put down the red car, picked up his fork, and looked at me with the expression of a man biding his time.
Estrella watched them with the expression she sometimes got when she thought no one was looking — open, undefended, a love so large it seemed almost to surprise her each time she encountered it.
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
“They’re a lot,” she said, quietly enough that the children wouldn’t hear.
“They’re wonderful,” I said, which was true and which also wasn’t quite the whole truth.
The whole truth was something I was still finding words for — the strange rightness of sitting at this table, in this apartment, with this woman and her magnificent chaotic children, eating enchiladas in Los Angeles on a Tuesday evening while a four-year-old planned a race I would apparently be commentating, as if I had always been doing exactly this and would always do it.
After dinner, after Luz had exhausted her napkin curriculum and Pedro had completed his race and both children had been bathed and tucked in with a story — tonight a tale about a very small knight who was not frightened of anything, a story I mostly invented on the spot with contributions from Luz, who had strong opinions about the knight’s horse — Estrella and I sat at the kitchen table with what remained of the wine.
She told me about Roberto. The managed version first — the practical facts, the custody arrangement, the timeline of contact, or lack of it. Her voice had the smooth, practiced quality of someone who has told a story so many times that they’ve sanded off all the edges.
I listened to the managed version, and then I said, “And the part you’re not telling me?”
She looked up from her wine glass.
“You’re giving me the version for lawyers,” I said. “Or agents. The one where it’s all very sorted and under control.” I kept my voice easy, no pressure in it. “I’m not a lawyer or an agent.”
Something shifted in her expression. A small loosening.
“He called me this morning,” she said again, but differently this time.
“And when I heard his voice — that particular voice, the warm one he uses when he wants something — I felt seventeen different things at once, and none of them were sorted.” She turned her glass slowly on the table.
“I felt angry. Which I expected. And tired. Also expected.” A pause.
“And then I felt guilty, which is the one I can’t stand, because I have nothing to be guilty about.
I have full custody. I have done nothing wrong.
I brought my children somewhere safe and I have built something real here and I have nothing —“ She stopped.
“But you still feel it,” I said.
“I still feel it.” She looked at me with the exasperated honesty of someone who has been betrayed by their own nervous system.
“He has this gift. He makes his absence feel like something I caused. Like if I had only been different, easier, less — he would have stayed. He would have shown up.” She shook her head.
“I know it isn’t true. I have known it isn’t true for three years. And yet.”
“And yet,” I agreed.
I did not say everything I thought about Roberto, because most of it was not useful. I said: “Whatever he does, whatever he tries — you have full custody, you have documentation, and you have every right to manage his access entirely on your terms.”
“I know,” she said. “I know all of this. It just —” She turned her wine glass slowly. “It still lands. Even now. It still makes me feel like I did something wrong.”
“You didn’t.”
“No.” She looked up. “I know. I just needed to say it out loud to someone who wasn’t my mother or my lawyer.” A pause. “Thank you for listening.”
“Anytime.”
She smiled at that — small and real. “You keep saying that. Anytime. Like it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” I said. “But it’s also not complicated. I want to be here. Anytime you need someone to be here.”
The kitchen was quiet except for the distant sound of the city outside the window. Estrella looked at me for a moment with the expression I was learning to recognize — the one where she was letting herself believe something she wasn’t entirely sure she trusted yet.
Then she said goodnight, and I walked to the car, and I sat in it for a moment before starting the engine.
On the passenger seat was my notebook — the one I’d been carrying for six months, the one titled Football is Life at the top of page one in increasingly mocking letters. I picked up my pen and opened it to a new page, well past the abandoned memoir, and I wrote three words.
I looked at them for a while. Then I put the notebook back on the seat, started the car, and drove home.
The three words stayed in my head the whole way.
Not Football is Life.
Something else. Something I wasn’t ready to name yet, but that had been waiting, I was beginning to suspect, for longer than I knew.