Chapter Seventeen
JUNIE
Here is what the old Junie would have done, and I can speak to this with authority because I watched her load the play like a coach reviewing tape of a bad line change.
The old Junie would have sat in her car in the Moontower lot with the screenshot glowing in her hand and begun, immediately, to handle it.
Alone. She would have built a containment plan by midnight, drafted three statements by two, identified the leak by dawn through sheer forensic spite, and told no one until it was fixed or until it detonated, whichever came first, because the oldest wiring in the house says a heavy thing carried quietly weighs nothing, and if nobody sees you carrying it, nobody can call you a lot.
That’s not what happened this time. What happened this time is that I called Saint before I had finished reading the text, while the fear was still wet, before I had a plan or a statement or a single manageable version of myself, and I read Deacon’s eleven words into the truck speakers of a man who had just played the best game of his career, and I ruined his night, on purpose, immediately, and I want a plaque for it.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Stay there. I’m coming to your car.”
“You don’t have to,”
“Junie. Which row.”
He crossed the lot still in his post-game suit, hair wet, and got into my passenger seat, and my little hatchback took him the way a kayak takes a Newfoundland, and he held out his hand for the phone and read the whole thing twice without his face moving, which I’d learned by then meant it was moving plenty, just below the waterline.
“D,” he said.
“Deacon. It’s Deacon. The smiley face is Deacon, the timing is Deacon, the ‘care to comment’ is Deacon, he used to make me put ‘care to comment’ in outreach templates because he read somewhere it converts.
” My voice was doing something I let it do.
“Saint, that’s the draft version. The early one, from before we moved everything to the secure doc.
It had rule 7 in it. It had my COMMENTS in it. If he has that, he has,”
“He has a story,” Saint said. “‘Team faked the romance for engagement numbers.’ Playoffs coming. Sponsors. The viability review.” He handed the phone back. “He’s not asking you to comment. He’s telling you he has it, and watching what you do.”
“I know what he’s doing, I built outreach funnels for this man for three years, I know his whole,”
“Junie.” Quiet. The register he uses on the left post. “What do you want to do first?”
And here’s the thing. He didn’t say what should we do, or here’s what we’ll do, or don’t worry.
He asked what I wanted to do first, like I was the starting goalie on this particular ice, which I was, and I looked at the screenshot, and I heard Hazel’s voice saying the paperwork comes due, and I heard my own clause, rule 1, nobody lies to the team, the first rule I ever wrote, and I said the bravest sentence of my adult life, which turned out to be logistics:
“We tell Barb and Rich. Tonight. Together. Before he posts anything, before we know how bad it is, while it’s still ours to tell.”
Saint looked at me for a second. Then he nodded, once, the good nod, the forty-six-saves nod, and took out his own phone, and that is how, at 11:20 on the night of the Quebec game, the four of us ended up in Coach Barb’s office, which smells like gum and dry-erase marker, with GM Rich in yesterday’s cactus tie because he’d come straight from the sponsor suite, and I stood at the whiteboard and briefed my own scandal like a campaign.
I gave them everything. The Rulebook, its real history, the amendments, which they mostly knew, rule 1 having functioned all season exactly as designed.
The draft version and where it had lived: my personal template folder, cloud-synced, the folder I built at the agency and took with me the way you take a toolbox.
Deacon. The podcast. The “a lot” clip, which Barb had apparently already seen, because Barb has seen everything, and then, because it was the night for it, because half-honest is a lie with better lighting, I gave them the last piece, the one nobody knew.
“He DM’d me in March,” I said. “Personal account. ‘Cute stunt, very on brand, drinks, for old times.’ I screenshotted it, filed it, and told no one. That was wrong. It was the old play. If I’d flagged it in March we’d have had six weeks of runway on this instead of a Saturday night.
” I looked at Saint when I said the next part, because he’d earned line of sight.
“I’m telling you now because the rule says nobody lies to the team, and sitting on it was a lie with extra steps. ”
Saint’s face did the two-degree thing. Not anger. I checked. Something more like a man watching a save get made at the far end.
Barb chewed through the entire debrief at a slow, thoughtful rate, and when I finished she said, “Okay. First: nobody in this room is fired, so both of you can stop standing like that.” We adjusted. “Second: the intern.”
“What intern?”
“You said the folder was your agency toolbox. Who else ever had hands on your toolbox?”
And it landed like a puck off the glass, because there was exactly one answer.
My old agency intern, Bryce, twenty-three, eager, competent, the one I’d trained on my template system personally, the one I’d shared the folder with in a different life because sharing your systems is what good managers do.
Bryce, who still worked for Deacon. Bryce, whose access I had never revoked, because you don’t revoke the past, you just move to Austin and assume it stops syncing.
“He didn’t hack anything,” I said slowly. “He didn’t have to. It’s been sitting in a shared folder for two years. Deacon didn’t steal the draft. He paid twenty-three-year-old rent money for a login I never closed.”
“Good,” Barb said, and when we all stared at her: “It’s good.
Nobody broke in. An old key got used by a small man.
That’s a story about him, not about you, and stories about small men have short seasons.
” She stood, which meant the meeting was choosing its ending.
“Rich, call legal in the morning, quietly. Junie, kill that folder tonight, then write me a one-pager on what he has and what he doesn’t.
Saint.” She looked at him and her gum stopped.
“You played the game of your life tonight. I need forty more minutes of that a night through April, and I need you to hear me: this changes nothing on my bench. Whatever the two of you are, the standings say keep it.”
Rich, who had been quietly leaking at the eyes since the word “sponsors,” blew his nose with tremendous dignity and said, “For the record, I never thought it was fake,” and Barb said, “Rich, you commissioned it,” and Rich said, “I commissioned the not-denying. The rest happened on its own, I have EYES, Barbara,” and that was somehow the sentence that let all the air back into the room.
By midnight it was almost handled, in the sense that nothing was handled but everything was shared, which I was learning was a different and better condition.
The folder was dead. Legal was queued. And then, at 12:14, Deacon did the Deacon thing: his podcast account posted a teaser.
Black background, white type, his logo. “PLAYOFFS SPECIAL. The story the Austin Chupacabras don’t want you to hear.
Receipts. April.” Forty thousand likes by the time I stopped refreshing, which Saint accomplished by taking my phone and putting it in Barb’s desk drawer, an intervention I permitted because his hand stayed on mine an extra second in transit.
He walked me to my car. The lot was empty except for Gus’s truck and the moths making a congregation of the light poles, and the night had that warm early-April thickness Austin does, and we stood by my door not saying anything for a minute, which with him is a conversation.
“You called me first,” he said finally.
“I called you before I even finished reading it. You should know there was no strategy in it. There wasn’t even a decision.
My hands just went there.” I looked up at him.
“That’s new. The March thing, the screenshot, that was the old wiring, and I’m not proud of it.
But tonight my hands went to you first, and I need you to log it, because I don’t know how to say the rest yet. ”
“Logged,” he said, and he meant it the way he means the pipes.
He opened my car door, which he does like it’s a duty roster item, and I got in, and he stood there holding the top of the door, and the parking lot light did what it could with his face, and he said, quiet, to the asphalt more than to me:
“Rule one was my rule.”
I knew what he meant. Rule 1 had been my drafting but his condition, the clause he’d required across that diner table before he’d sign anything, the one thing the most careful man alive had asked for: nobody lies to the team.
And now a stranger in Dallas had a copy of it in a screenshot, highlighted in yellow, and was going to read it aloud to the world as evidence of the lie.
“We didn’t break it,” I said.
He looked at me. The whole face, the below-the-waterline part surfacing for once, all the way up.
“No,” he said. “He did.”
And the distinction landed like a save, like a glove closing on the high shot at the exact top of its arc, because that was the whole architecture in four words: the rule held, the team knew, nobody in the building had been lied to by anybody in the building, and the man with the receipts was holding proof of a promise, and didn’t know it yet.
He shut my door. Tapped the roof of my car, twice.
Left, then right.