Chapter 13
“No, Cole. You are not greeting the CFO first.”
He paused mid-stride near the touchline and looked back over his shoulder.
He was wearing the blue-and-white training kit, jersey half-tucked into his shorts, fresh tape winding beneath his sleeves.
Behind him, an equipment manager dragged a tackle bag across the wet grass.
The dull thud of rugby balls slamming into padded shields drifted over from the far end of the pitch.
“What if I like him?” he asked.
“You don't like anyone who asks for the cost-per-referral metric before saying good morning.”
“Then you’re saving me the disappointment.”
I ran a finger over the laminated badge hanging from my lanyard. HALCYON x SENTINELS in clean white block letters over a navy banner. The design left zero room for personal complications, and I was grateful for the clarity.
Tessa was waiting for us by the welcome tent, her tablet propped against a case of bottled water, a clear earpiece tucked into one ear.
Behind her, the low bleachers were filling with volunteers, partner clinic staff, and a handful of donors whom the front office had coached everyone to call community guests.
A video camera was mounted on a tripod by the sideline.
It wasn't a formal press conference. Which was far worse for my nerves: it was an ordinary morning with people watching.
“The only group photo happens at the very end,” Tessa said. “No one-on-one media interviews outside the program agenda. If anyone asks about anything else, you send them straight to me.”
“Is anyone planning to ask about anything else?” I asked.
Tessa held my gaze for a second.
“Not if I have anything to say about it.”
It wasn't an impossible promise. It was just her doing her job. I appreciated her more for it.
Cole adjusted the athletic tape on his left forearm. I saw him catch himself before his hand could reach out to steady my elbow when a sudden gust flapped the hem of my jacket. Instead, he pointed toward the edge of the pitch.
“Diane’s here.”
My boss was walking toward us alongside Sasha, the CFO, and two executive committee members from Halcyon.
Diane wore a structured black coat over a navy sheath dress; Sasha had a folder tucked under her arm and white sneakers that looked entirely too pristine for Georgetown turf.
The CFO surveyed the facility with the wary skepticism of a man who suspected an athletic club might bill him for the air he breathed near a ball.
“Good morning,” Diane said as she reached us. “Kate, the agenda is yours. Cole, thank you for opening up your training session to us.”
“Thanks for coming down,” he replied. “Though I can't promise our players’ knees are great advertising for preventive medicine.”
“That depends on how you define preventive,” I said.
Sasha let out a quiet chuckle. Cole glanced at me sideways, just long enough for me to notice he was trying very hard not to.
A whistle pierced the air. The Sentinels began filtering into lines beside the orange cones.
Moving through the cluster of jerseys, I spotted Marcus, broad-shouldered even in practice gear, and Reyes, holding a scrum cap in one hand while listening to an assistant coach. Both of them glanced over at the tent.
Both of them knew.
The clasp of my grandmother’s gold watch found my thumb. I clicked it open. Clicked it shut.
Cole had told the truth yesterday. He’d named Marcus and Reyes before realizing it was my story too.
I’d said I wasn't going to demand he grieve in total isolation.
Even so, the distance between knowing they knew while sitting on my living room sofa and having those two large men walking across the grass toward me made my stomach knot tight.
Marcus reached us first. He wiped his palms on his shorts before extending a hand to Diane.
“Marcus Webb. Thanks for being here.”
He greeted Sasha, the CFO, and the rest of the executive committee with the casual ease of a man who could charm a charity gala without ever losing his locker-room edge.
When he turned to me, he didn't drop his voice or tilt his head with that suffocating pity I’d already learned to spot from fifty paces.
“Kate Mercer,” he said. “Cole swears you’re the only reason anyone in this room is going to understand what we’re doing today.”
I took his hand. His grip was huge, rough, and brief.
“Cole has an offensive amount of faith in my slide decks.”
“He has an offensive amount of faith in a lot of things.”
Reyes hung back half a step behind Marcus. He was leaner than Cole, sweat plastering his dark hair to his forehead, a fresh scrape marking the brow above his left eye.
“Hey, Kate,” he said. “Glad you could make it.”
“Thanks, Reyes.”
That was it. No heavy pause. No loaded *How are you doing?
* that forced me to choose between lying and turning the morning into a confessional booth.
Marcus turned to Cole to ask if he still thought stretching was a medical staff conspiracy.
Reyes muttered a complaint about his scrum cap. The pitch remained just a pitch.
My chest didn't completely loosen, but it stopped bracing against a threat nobody had brought into the room.
“We’re live in five,” Tessa announced from the tent opening.
Cole jogged back toward the field with Marcus and Reyes. Before he turned away, he touched two fingers to an imaginary cap brim at his temple. It wasn't a signal anyone else needed to decipher. I didn't decipher it either. I just saw it.
* * *
The CFO stood with his hands jammed deep into his coat pockets, looking like a man who suspected that if he asked the wrong question, someone in cleats would tackle him into the mud.
“So they really can't pass the ball forward?” he asked as the first drill got underway in front of us.
“Not with their hands,” I said. “They can kick it forward, but all manual passes have to travel backward or laterally. The objective is to advance as a continuous unit until someone grounds the ball in the in-goal area.”
“An elegant summary,” Marcus called out from the line of cones. “Almost accurate.”
The committee turned toward him. Marcus had a rugby ball tucked under one massive arm and a grin taking up half his face.
“Thank you for that entirely unprompted audit,” I shot back.
“Just protecting the accuracy of the program.”
“Then stop turning the ball over in the ruck and I’ll have cleaner data.”
There was a split second of stunned silence. Then Sasha burst out laughing. Diane brought a hand to her mouth, a beat too late to pretend she wasn't amused. The CFO looked over at Cole, clearly hoping for a translation.
“In executive terms,” Cole said smoothly, “Kate just accused Marcus of failing to submit his status reports on time.”
“Now that I understand,” the CFO said.
Marcus placed a dramatic, theatrical hand over his chest.
“I am never teaching an executive seminar again.”
“You weren't teaching one to begin with,” I said.
“Even less of one now.”
The ripple of laughter moved through the group and dissolved into the referee’s next whistle.
I hadn't forgotten what Marcus knew. But I hadn't let it become the only thing he was allowed to be to me either.
His ribbing didn't ask me to perform better than I felt.
It simply allowed me to be the woman who understood the game well enough to hit back.
Tessa signaled us over, and we gathered around the folding table where the program map was displayed.
We’d printed the first eight referral pathways onto a rigid foam board: partner clinics, community health workers, medical interpreters, and post-discharge follow-up contacts.
The Halcyon and Sentinels logos shared the header without fighting for center stage.
“This isn't an image campaign,” I said, tracing the blue workflow arrows with one finger.
“The club already has deep community relationships in these neighborhoods.
Halcyon provides the referral routing, care coordination, and data tracking.
The clinics determine their own intake capacity.
If a patient leaves the ER on a Friday afternoon, they shouldn't encounter a disconnected hotline on Monday morning.”
The CFO leaned over the board.
“And the medical interpreters are integrated before the follow-up call?”
“From the first contact, not as an afterthought,” Sasha answered firmly. “If we tack language access onto the back end, we’re designing a barrier and calling it efficiency.”
Diane nodded. Cole didn't chime in right away. He stood to my left, holding a water bottle, a streak of grass stain across one knee. He wasn't standing close enough for anyone to make something out of it, but he hadn't relegated himself to a decorative athlete either.
“We were out in Rainier Valley last week,” he told the committee.
“One of the clinic coordinators told us the hardest part isn't getting people to ask for help the first time. It’s that after asking once, they have to repeat their whole story to four different strangers. If this system cuts that down, we’ve actually built something that works. ”
He hadn't coordinated that talking point with me. I knew because he took a completely different angle and landed on the exact same conclusion. The quiet satisfaction it gave me was inconvenient only because it didn't fit into any structured agenda item.
A team photographer raised a camera. Tessa checked her tablet and subtly gestured for him to frame the map and the table, not the two of us. Cole kept talking about the community coordinators. I answered a follow-up question from Sasha. The moment passed without headlines.
When the executive committee dispersed to watch the scrimmage, Diane rested a hand briefly on my forearm.
“Good work,” she said. “You didn't water down the model just to make the walkthrough comfortable.”
“Comfortable models usually fail the second real patients try to use them.”
“Yes. That’s why I brought you on.”