Nerys
I have lived in this house for six years, and in that time no one has entered it who was not delivering a package, repairing a fixture, or Phaedra.
This is by design. The house is the space I built after the divorce, after the collapse, after the two-year silence during which I did nothing except walk Charleston's waterfront at odd hours and read course maps for courses I would never play again. I chose it for the marsh view and the morning light and the distance from anything that smelled like competition. I furnished it with precision. Every object is placed. Every room serves a function. Every surface is clean.
It is a house organized around the principle that if the external world is sufficiently controlled, the internal one can be managed.
Tala arrives at four in the afternoon on a Thursday, carrying a duffel bag and a paper bag from a bakery I've never visited because it's on King Street and King Street is for tourists and people who enjoy being near other people.
"I brought croissants," she says, standing on my porch.
"It's four PM."
"Croissants don't have a schedule. They're anarchists."
She steps inside.
I watch her the way I watch a player reading a course for the first time — the initial scan, the rapid assessment, the instinctive prioritization of what matters. Tala's eyes move through my house with the same focused attention she brings to approach shots. She catalogues the space in under thirty seconds.
She notices: the course maps framed on the hallway walls. The clean lines of the living room. The absence of photographs — not a single one visible, not of me, not of tournaments, not of anyone. The putting mat that occupies four feet of the living room floor. The two separate offices visible through open doors — one with a desk and computer, one with a drafting table covered in course maps.
She walks through the hallway toward the back of the house and finds the club room.
I hear her stop.
The club room is the one space in this house where control is not an aesthetic choice but a necessity. Fourteen club slots along the wall, each labeled. Three sets of wedges organized by bounce angle. Putter racks — four of them, because I own eleven putters and cannot bring myself to sell any despite the fact that holding them makes my hands remember things I have spent a decade trying to forget. Shelving units with notebooks, organized by year and course. A workbench for regripping. A small refrigerator for grip solvent that needs to remain at temperature.
And in the corner, a locked glass-front cabinet containing twelve trophies, three crystal bowls, and two major-championship plates.
Tala is standing in front of the cabinet when I reach the doorway.
"You keep them locked."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Because looking at them makes me feel the way I felt standing over the three-foot putt. Because they represent a version of me that was destroyed on national television. Because keeping them visible and unlocked would be like displaying a photograph of a dead lover in the bedroom where you sleep with someone new.
"They're from a different career," I say.
She nods. She doesn't push. She doesn't sayyou should be proudoryou earned thoseor any of the well-meaning observations that people offer when confronted with a champion's trophies in a champion's locked cabinet. She accepts the answer the way she's learning to accept a center-green target — without argument, because the reasoning is sound even if the instinct says otherwise.
Her eyes move to the shelf beside the cabinet. It's empty. Deliberately empty — a single shelf, dusted regularly, positioned at eye height, holding nothing.
"What's the empty shelf for?"
"I don't know yet."
She looks at me. I look at the shelf. Six years I've kept it there, and the honest answer to her question is that I installed it during the first week in this house because I believed, with the irrational certainty of a woman rebuilding herself from wreckage, that I would eventually find something worth placing on an empty shelf in a room full of locked achievements.
I didn't know what.
Standing in the doorway watching Tala Sarmiento examine my house with the same attention she gave my body in Singapore, I am beginning to suspect.
•
I cook dinner.
