CHAPTER ONE
Tala
The smart shot is a 7-iron to the center of the fairway.
I know this because three different caddies have told me the same thing over the past eighteen months, and I fired every one of them for reasons that made sense at the time and sound increasingly pathetic in retrospect.
I know this because the trees guarding the left side of the fifteenth fairway are sixty feet tall and spaced eight feet apart, which means the gap I'm staring at is roughly the width of a refrigerator turned sideways, and the ball would need to start low, cut hard, carry a hundred and ninety yards through humid Arizona air, and land on a green that slopes back-to-front like a ski run.
I know the smart shot is a 7-iron to the center of the fairway because I can see the percentages as clearly as if someone tattooed them on the inside of my eyelids. Eighty percent success rate for a safe par. Maybe a birdie putt from thirty feet if the bounce cooperates. Walk to sixteen with the damage contained.
I pull the 4-iron.
My temporary caddie — a quiet man named Greg who I hired six days ago and who has already developed the facial tic of someone regretting a career decision — shifts the bag on his shoulder.
"Tala, if we lay up—"
"I see the gap."
"The gap is—"
"I see it, Greg."
He stops talking. They always stop talking. I've made that particular tone of voice so effective that grown men with decades of course experience swallow their advice like aspirin and step back.
I should feel bad about that.
I will feel bad about that. Later. After I thread this 4-iron through the trees and watch it release onto the green and roll to six feet and remind every single person watching this broadcast that Tala Sarmiento does not lay up.
I set up over the ball. Grip pressure firm. Feet shoulder width. I can feel the broadcast cameras — two of them, one behind the tee and one positioned at the green, because the producers know what I'm about to do. They've watched enough of my rounds to understand that three shots back with four holes to play is not a deficit for me.
It's permission.
I take the club back low and fast. My hips clear. My hands drop. The contact is pure — the kind of pure that sends vibration up through the shaft and into my forearms and tells me before I even look that the ball is going exactly where I aimed it.
For approximately one point four seconds, I am right about everything.
The ball starts low and left. Cuts toward the gap. Enters the trees on a perfect trajectory.
Then it catches a branch I didn't see.
Not one of the main trunks — a branch. A reaching, inconvenient, shit-luck branch that has no business existing at that height on that tree, and the ball deflects sideways with a sound like a gunshot and ricochets off a second trunk and dropsstraight down into the creek that runs along the left side of the hole.
The gallery groans. The sound is almost sympathetic, which makes it worse.
I stand over the empty tee box and watch the ripples in the water where my ball entered and I feel something hot and tight and completely unproductive climbing up through my chest.
Don't.
I snap the 4-iron over my knee.
The shaft breaks cleanly — graphite composite, surprisingly cooperative when you're having the worst moment of your professional day. Both halves hit the ground at the same time. The sound is satisfying in a way that I know, even as I'm hearing it, is going to cost me.
"Miss Sarmiento."
Marzanna Pike is already walking toward me. Tournament rules official. Polish American. Five-foot-ten, immaculate khakis, zero tolerance for my particular brand of self-expression.
"Conduct warning," she says, stopping three feet away. She doesn't raise her voice. She never does. "Equipment abuse. One more incident today and it's a penalty stroke."
