Chapter 22 — The Confession （Beck） #2
“I should have.” Marisol met her eyes. “No more cryptic warnings. I am sorry, honey.”
Nora's shoulders eased, not all the way. “Help us finish it.”
“Every log, every schedule, every camera request,” Marisol said. “You have all of me now.”
Pruitt pocketed the badge and turned to Cole, jaw set.
“You'll rewrite every paper,” Pruitt said to Cole. “In your own hand, with tutoring logged. If compliance sits you a game, you sit.”
“Yes, sir,” Cole whispered. “I'll do all of it.”
“And you'll tell Marisol everything,” Pruitt said. “Today. No more handlers. You need help reading, you ask this program out loud.”
Cole nodded hard. “Today. I swear it.”
Pruitt looked at me long.
“That locker notebook,” Pruitt said. “The one he photographed. Where's the real one?”
“On me.” I pulled my black grid notebook from my jacket's inside pocket and held it up.
Ninety-six numbered pages, every one of them mine, the real routes living in my head first and the paper second.
“This stays with me. But the locker one — the decoy — that's yours now. All of it. Every fake look I fed him since September.”
I crossed to my locker bag in the corner, pulled out the black decoy notebook, and set the whole thing square in Pruitt's hands. Every false route. Every bait phrase. Nothing held back.
“Take it,” I said. “Clear Cole and keep Nora out of the blast. I don't need the edge. I need them.”
Cole stared at the decoy in Pruitt's hands. “Beck, that's your whole edge. If the room thinks you're clean because you gave up your own book —”
“Then they think right,” I said. “Plays don't matter if I lose my people keeping them.”
“Beck,” Nora breathed, and her fingers found mine and held on.
Pruitt slid the decoy into his binder and snapped it shut. “I'll tell the room myself. Nobody touches this kid's name again.”
Pruitt weighed the decoy in his palm. Something shifted in his face, skeptic going soft around the eyes.
“That's a starting-job weapon you're handing me, son,” Pruitt said. “You sure?”
“Never been surer of anything I see,” I said.
Nora made a small sound. I turned, and she was crying without wiping it, just standing there letting the tears track down. I opened my jacket wide.
“Come here, love, I've missed your hands in mine.” My voice came out rough. “Get in here.”
She stepped into my jacket and slid her freezing hands up under my arms, palms flat to my ribs. I wrapped the wool shut around her and pressed my forehead to hers, breathing her cinnamon air. Her whole body shivered once, then settled warm against me.
“I'm cold, but I've never felt safer than this.” Nora's whisper shook. “Don't let go yet.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Not ever in front of people again.”
I knotted my fingers through hers where the whole room could see it and held our joined hands up out of the jacket, plain and deliberate. Cole watched with his mouth working. Pruitt watched and nodded once, slow, like a man filing something important.
Then I let go with one hand and crossed to Cole and gripped his shoulder hard enough to feel the bone under my palm. Cole flinched, then froze, staring at the cracked picture-cards spread between us.
“Look at me,” I said. “I hate what you did, but I won't lose you.”
Cole's breath hitched. “Beck —”
“You carried my cards since freshman year. Let me carry this.” I squeezed his shoulder till he met my eyes. “We fix the papers. Real ones, your words, my pictures. You work. That's the deal. No free pass. You hear me?”
“I hear you.” Cole's tears spilled over. “Whatever it takes. Film room, mornings, all of it.”
A knock came soft at the open door, and Deon stood there in his practice sweats with his helmet under his arm, taking in the screenshots, the decoy in Pruitt's hands, Cole's red eyes, Nora's hand still knotted in mine.
Deon looked at me a long moment, and something easy and ungrudging crossed his face.
He stepped in and clasped my hand hard, palm to palm, the way quarterbacks do.
“This room is yours now, and I am glad everybody finally sees you.” Deon grinned, crooked and real. “About time, Picasso.”
My chest went hot and full enough to hurt. “Deon —”
“Don't.” Deon squeezed once and let go. “Just win the thing,” he said, and I nodded because my throat had closed.
“You mean that?” I asked.
Deon shrugged, easy. “You've drawn the same cover three ways since freshman camp. I've seen your head, man. It's time everybody else did.”
My throat burned. “Thanks.”
“Don't thank me.” Deon bumped my shoulder with his. “Beat Clearwater.”
? ? ?
Pruitt's facility office smelled like mint and leather and old paper, playbook binders ranked spine-out along the wall and the blinds throwing thin stripes over everything.
The whole crew had crowded down the locker hallway outside the quarterback room to stand in the cold sun leaking through the high windows: me, Nora tucked under my arm, Cole with his cracked cards clutched to his chest, Deon leaning easy on the wall.
Cleats echoed off the tile. Somebody's tape ripped somewhere down the row, and a door clicked shut two rooms over.
A couple of linemen drifted closer, helmets in hands, pretending not to listen. Down the tile somebody killed the music. The quiet spread door to door.
Cole stepped forward with his cracked cards shaking in his fist. “Room hears it from me first,” he said, low. “All of it. Whatever it costs.”
“It'll cost work,” I said. “Not your seat. Not if I can help it.”
“You can't help this one,” Cole said. “This one's mine to carry.”
“We carry it,” Nora said. “That's what rooms do.”
Nora slipped her fingers over my wrist, right onto the navy paracord band, and traced the green thread she'd knotted there weeks back. The touch landed quiet through my whole arm. My shoulders dropped an inch.
“We've got twelve days till the Frost Bowl, and we're not wasting one.” Nora's voice rang clear down the tile, steady as her hand had been on the screenshots. “Whatever the pod says. Whatever anybody says.”
Pruitt looked at her, then at our knotted hands, then at me. He waited.
Nora lifted her chin. “I'm with him, and I'm not hiding anymore.”
The hallway went pin-drop still. Then Deon laughed, one short bark, and clapped the wall. Cole let out a breath that was half sob, half laugh. Heat climbed my neck, good heat, clean heat, and I pulled Nora tighter into my side and pressed a kiss to her temple where everybody could see.
Pruitt lifted the login printout where the entire hallway could see the staff name printed black on white.
“The uploads came from Trey Satterfield's account,” he said. “Beck Hale and Nora Quinn are cleared. Cole Danner cooperated and will answer for his part through compliance, not gossip. Anyone who repeats the lie after today answers to me.”
He looked straight toward the phones at the end of the hall. “Kip posts the correction tonight. At the Frost Bowl, he says it on camera in front of everyone he fed the lie to. If he refuses either one, the university handles him.”
The silence broke all at once—cleats shifting, somebody swearing under his breath, Deon clapping once against the wall.
Nora squeezed my hand. “They heard your name wrong for weeks. Now they hear it right.”
I raised our joined hands. “And yours with mine.”