She sits on the bed beside me. Not facing me — beside me. Shoulder to shoulder. The same position we held in the cottage, the same three inches of space, the same deliberate proximity that offers contact without demanding it.
She takes my hand. The right one. The shaking one. She holds it in both of hers.
She doesn't speak. She doesn't tell me the interview was brave. She doesn't tell me my hands will stop shaking. She doesn't tell me the documentary will be worth it or that the footage doesn't define me or that I'm stronger than I think.
She holds my hand in the dark. She breathes beside me. She stays.
After twenty minutes, the tremor subsides. Not because she cured it. Because the sustained presence of a person who does not require me to be steady in order to remain seated beside me allows my nervous system to register safety, and safety is the only environment in which my hands have ever reliably stopped shaking.
We don't have sex. We don't discuss it. She lies down beside me, fully clothed, and I lie beside her, and her head finds my shoulder and my arm comes around her and we sleep in the darkroom in the Scottish hotel while the wind outside rearranges the world for tomorrow's tournament.
•
The tournament resumes. Two rounds. The course is transformed by the storm — the wind has dried the greens faster than expected, the bunkers have been raked but the sand is different, the fairways hold moisture in unexpected places.
I adjust the strategy between rounds. Tala follows every adjustment. Every recommendation. Every club selection. She plays the course the way we mapped it at dawn — with her feet as well as her eyes, reading the hidden slopes, feeling the changes the storm carved into the terrain.
She shoots sixty-seven in the third round. Sixty-nine in the fourth.
She finishes the tournament in fourth place. Three shots behind the winner, a Swedish player named Elsa Lindgren who has been ranked second in the world for two years and plays links golf like she was born in a bunker.
Fourth place. Consistent. Disciplined. Smart.
Tala signs her scorecard in the tent. I wait behind the ropes with the bag. She walks toward me across the practice green, hat off, hair blowing in the coastal wind, looking tired and satisfied and like a woman who has run a race at a pace she chose rather than a pace imposed by panic.
"You are becoming the player I knew you could be," I tell her.
She stops. Looks at me. The scar on her lip catches the light.
"And you're becoming the woman I knew you were."
The words are quiet. Directed at me, not at the golf. Not at the strategist or the caddie or the former champion. At the woman who sat in the dark last night with shaking hands and a locked door and was found — not rescued, not repaired — found,by a person willing to sit on a corridor floor for an hour rather than walk away.
I take the bag. We walk to the car park. We don't touch. We don't need to.
The course behind us is ancient, patient, and entirely indifferent to what any two women feel about each other while walking its grounds.
But we feel it anyway.
And for the first time since the collapse, I'm not afraid of what I feel.
I'm afraid of what happens if I stop.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tala
I don't go to the studio.
Nerys asked me not to. Not in those words — she said, "The interview is a professional obligation and I'd prefer to manage it independently," which in Nerys's dialect meansplease don't watch me try to be brave and possibly fail at it while cameras record the attempt.
I respect the boundary. I spend the afternoon at the hotel gym, running intervals on the treadmill until my lungs burn and my legs feel clean and the restless energy that comes from knowing someone I love is doing something hard without me has been metabolized into sweat.
She texts me at three forty-seven.
Left early. Back at hotel.
Three words. No explanation. The brevity tells me everything the explanation would.
