And I've been treating it as a liability.
"I'm going to stop," I say.
Elena tilts her head. "Stop what."
"Pretending the cautious choice is the same as the right one." I pick up my wine glass. My hands are steadier now. "I've been careful my whole life." I look at her. "I'm tired of it."
Elena reaches for her own glass. Her eyes arebright. She raises it toward me without speaking. I raise mine. We don't make a toast. We don't need one. She fills my glass a second time and we sit together on the couch with the city going on outside my window, and she doesn't say I told you so and I don't say she did, and somewhere across Chicago Maxwell Stevens is in his apartment not sleeping, and I am finally, at twenty-four years old, done making a case against the thing I want.
My phone is on the counter. I don't pick it up tonight. Tonight belongs to this. To saying the true thing in the kitchen and feeling it land. Tomorrow belongs to what comes next.
But the decision is made. It was made the second I watched him walk away.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Toni Amato
My father calls while I’m at my kitchen table with the ethics review documentation spread in front of me. The review concluded yesterday. The dock incident was documented and explained, and the relationship timeline was outside the scope of the formal assignment. I am cleared. I am exactly where I worked to be.
I answer on the second ring.
“He came to see me,” my father says.
I go very still.
“Tuesday. My office.” A pause. “He brought documentation.” I set down my pen. “The penalty differential,” my father says. “Before and after the assignment. He put it together himself. In your format.” Another pause—this time, shorter and more deliberate. “He didn’t ask for anything, Antonia. Hesaid he wanted me to have accurate information. He gave it to me and left.”
The kitchen is peaceful. Outside my window, Chicago is doing its thing with traffic, wind off the lake, the distant sound of the city being enormous and indifferent. “He didn’t ask you to—“ I stop. Start again. “He didn’t ask for anything?”
“He specifically said so.” My father’s voice carries something I haven’t heard in it before. Recalibration. “He said — “ A pause where he is choosing the precise words, the way he always does. “He said you were the first person to tell him his instincts were right and his habits were the problem.” Another pause. “He thought I should know what you built.”
What you built.My eyes close.
He drove to the league offices on his day off to hand my father a piece of paper and ask for nothing. Not a blessing. Not permission. Not even a different opinion. Just the complete version of the truth, laid on a desk with the edges aligned.
“Dad.”
“I have concerns,” he says. “I’ll always have concerns. That’s the job.” A beat. “But I was imprecise the other night. About what changes a man.” His voice is cautious. “I’ve revised that.”
I don’t trust my voice right now. I wait.
“The ethics review,” he says.
“Concluded yesterday. Cleared.”
“Good.” A pause. “Call me Sunday.”
“I will.”
“Antonia.”
“Yes.”
“The data in that second document,” he says. “It’s the strongest behavioral reversal I’ve ever seen in a conduct case.”
He hangs up. I sit at my kitchen table with the phone in my hand and the ethics review documentation spread in front of me, and the city going on outside my window.
What you built.
