She nods. Once. The movement is small and precise and entirely unlike her.
"Thursday," I say. "Coastal event. South Carolina. Heavy wind expected. I'll have the strategy ready by Tuesday. When I present it, I need you to engage with it. Challenge it. Tell me where you think I'm wrong. But commit to the process before we reach the first tee, or tell me honestly that you can't."
"I can."
"We'll see."
I get in my car. I don't start the engine immediately. I sit behind the wheel and I allow myself ten seconds — ten, precisely counted — to feel what I have spent four hours suppressing.
My hands are on the steering wheel. I look at them. Long fingers. The scar on my right thumb from a broken glass twelve years ago. The faint lines of tendon visible beneath the skin.
Steady.
They are steady, and I wish they weren't, because trembling would be the honest physiological response to standing three feet from Tala Sarmiento while she dropped her armor in a parking lot and showed me the woman underneath, and my body's refusal to register the impact feels like its own kind of lie.
I tighten my grip on the wheel until my knuckles turn pale. Then I release. The blood returns. The warmth returns. I start the engine.
My phone is in the center console. I call Phaedra.
"How did it go?"
"She's a disaster."
Phaedra is quiet for a beat. She's reading the silence — the thing I'm not saying inside the thing I am.
"You're staying."
I pull out of the parking lot. The desert highway stretches ahead, flat and shimmering, and in my rearview mirror Tala Sarmiento is standing in the same spot I left her, watching my car leave.
"Obviously," I say.
I hang up. Drive. The course notebooks are in the back seat. Four of them filled with Tala's name.
In the yardage book, beneath the round's final score, I write:
Apology without deflection. No excuse offered. First instance of genuine accountability in the data I've collected. Requires follow-up.
Then, beneath that, smaller, in handwriting only I will ever read:
She looked at me like I was the first person who ever walked away and she wanted me to come back.
She was not wrong to want that.
I close the book and drive toward the hotel and I do not think about her hands at her sides, empty and open, for the remaining forty minutes of the journey.
I think about them for thirty-seven.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tala
The wind at Kiawah Island is not wind.
Wind is what happens in Phoenix — a dry push across flat ground, polite and predictable. What comes off the Atlantic and crosses this South Carolina barrier island is something closer to a living system. It shifts direction between holes. It strengthens in gusts that arrive without visual warning. It carries salt and sand and the particular cruelty of a coastline that has been punishing golfers for decades and has no intention of stopping.
I hate it immediately.
"The wind is your ally today," Nerys says on the first tee.
