Something shifts under my ribs.
I don’t name it.
Not yet.
Chapter fourteen
Nova
Histextarrivesatseven A.M.:
That was fair.
Three words.
I read them standing at my counter in yesterday’s t-shirt with coffee I haven’t tasted yet and everything in me just — stops. Not dramatically. Worse than that. Quietly. Like my whole morning runs into a wall and doesn’t know how to keep going.
I sit on the kitchen floor. I’m aware that’s not a normal response to a text message. I read it again anyway.
That was fair.
I wrote something honest about him and sent it into the world and he wants me to know he noticed. Not just that I wrote it. The fact that I tried to make it right.
That’s what gets me. Not the compliment, exactly. Not even the relief. The grace of it. The fact that he read what I wrote, understood what I was trying to do and met me there instead of making me drag the meaning out of him in pieces.
Just three words. No caveat. No weirdness. No making me work to figure out what he meant. And for some reason that’s what knocks me flat. I place my mug on the floor beside me before I spill it.
Brody leaves a voice memo. I listen to the whole damn thing. Somewhere in the middle his voice cracks for half a second and I put the phone down on the floor next to me and just look at the ceiling.
These people. This team.
I came here to cover a Cup run. Somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like work and started feeling like mine, which is a deeply unprofessional development. Now Brody’s voice cracks for half a second in the middle of a voice memo and I’m sitting on my kitchen floor staring at the ceiling like that did something to me.
It did.
Liam texts:
This shit’s good. Best sports writing I’ve read this season.
I read it six times. Liam is not a praise guy. He is barely a punctuation guy. So that one lands. Then Katarina texts Aurora and Aurora texts me:
He kept refreshing the page. Don't say anything. I’m not supposed to tell you that.
Refreshing the page. That one I’m not ready for.
Jax Mercer — who manages everything, who processes bad games by running them on a loop until they make sense, who went completely still when I found that knot in his shoulder like nobody had ever looked for it before — sat somewhere and kept hitting refresh to watch his own story land. Not the version I gave the world the first time. The true one. The fixed one. The one I should have written to begin with.
I open my personal notebook. Look at the blank page. Close it again.
Some things don’t need to be spelled out.
My editor calls and I call her right back because that’s what professionals do.
“The piece is everywhere.” She says numbers. I stop processing after the first one because it doesn’t matter — what matters is that I wrote something real and it’s out there now and I can’t take it back and, for once, I don’t want to.
That’s new. I usually always feel the need to take things back.
I open my laptop. Try to write the next thing. My brain goes exactly one place and stays there.
