“I’d offer you coffee, but I’m guessing this isn’t that kind of visit.”
“No.”
The pause stretches. He’s letting me go first. I let it stretch back. A man in his position doesn’t do small talk to fill silence; he uses silence as a tool. Fine. So can I.
Eventually he folds. “I’ve been expecting this.”
“Why.”
It isn’t a question the way I say it.
He sets his pen down. Picks his words. “Stakeholder considerations. Compliance review came back unfavorable. The brand exposure given the current news cycle is—challenging.” He says the words the way a doctor reads a diagnosis. “The decision wasn’t mine alone, Victor.”
“How long has the conversation been going.”
“Some time. These things don’t move quickly.”
“How long.”
He looks at me. Decides what the truth is going to cost him. Says it anyway.
“Closer to a year, Victor. It’s been a long process.”
Closer to a year.
He’d signed our renewal a month before the Hunt. A month after the Hunt, he was already in conversations with Dawson. Three weeks after that, the formal switch was on his desk. I’d watched him at the bar of a fight night in those same three weeks, his hand on Dawson’s shoulder, and decided to file it under noise.
I look at his hand. It’s resting flat on the desk now. Same hand. Same gesture I’d seen at the rail of the warehouse—steady, practiced, the hand of a man who’s done a thousand polished sit-downs like this one.
I’d watched that hand and told myself I’d deal with it Monday.
“You’ve been talking to Dawson about us since shortly after we signed,” I say. Not a question.
“I have a working relationship with Mr. Dawson. I had one with you.”
“Had. With me.”
He doesn’t correct me. He could. He doesn’t.
I sit there for another three seconds. Long enough to know I could keep going—could ask the things I came in here thinking I wanted to ask. About when the photographs first came up. About whether he’d been told what was coming. About whether the Hartwell who shook my hand at the renewal already knew that hand was a lie.
I find I don’t want any of those answers anymore. The shape of the thing is enough.
I stand.
“You should have told me to my face, Robert. At any point in the last year.”
His expression doesn’t change. He doesn’t reach for an apology. Doesn’t reach for anything.
I take that as the confirmation it is. Walk out without closing the door behind me. The carpet swallows my footsteps on the way to the elevator.
In the parking garage I sit in the Charger for a long time before I turn the key.
I drive for hours after that. The city empties around me. The radio stays off. I don’t take the route home, and I don’t take the route to Theo’s. I drive until the only place left is the one I’ve been avoiding all night.
I let myself in through the side door at quarter to one in the morning.
The gym is the kind of dark you don’t get during business hours—no fluorescent hum, no music bleeding from the speakers Cruz never turns off when he’s on the mats. Just thestandby lights on the cardio equipment, small red dots scattered like coordinates across a black room. The smell is the same as always. Sweat in the rubber. Iron in the air. The faint chemical of the disinfectant the cleaning crew sprays on the bags.
