I pick up my phone and text Bisi.
Fine. Set it up.
Her response comes in eleven seconds.
I already did. Arizona. Private course. Thursday morning. Don't be late and don't break anything.
I turn off the phone. Lie in the dark. The air conditioning hums. The ceiling offers no guidance.
Thursday.
Three days from now, I'm going to stand on a practice range next to a six-foot-tall, silver-streaked former champion who reads courses like scripture and whose hands once betrayed her on the biggest stage in the sport, and I'm going to let her tell me everything I'm doing wrong.
I press my palms flat against the mattress and feel my own pulse beating in my fingertips.
I already know she's going to be a problem.
I just haven't decided what kind.
CHAPTER TWO
Nerys
I have watched the footage nine times.
Not the collapse at Phoenix — the one the media is circulating, the broken club and the conduct warning and the expression on Tala Sarmiento's face that every commentator is calling reckless, unstable, out of control.
The footage I keep rewinding is from the sixteenth hole. After the disaster. After the double bogey and the broken iron and Marzanna Pike's quiet reprimand.
She birdies sixteen from twelve feet.
I've watched that putt nine times because the interesting part is not the result. The interesting part is the four seconds between Tala addressing the ball and beginning her stroke.
In those four seconds, her body changes. The tension in her shoulders drops by an inch. Her grip softens — not enough for a broadcast camera to detect, but I've studied putting mechanics for twenty years and I can see it. Her breathing shifts from chest to diaphragm. For four seconds, the woman who just snapped a club shaft over her knee becomes perfectly, dangerously still.
Then she rolls the ball into the center of the cup like she's dropping a letter into a mailbox.
She birdies seventeen from twenty-two feet.
And on eighteen, she pulls driver.
This is the pattern. Not recklessness. Not instability. Something considerably more complicated and far more interesting.
Tala Sarmiento knows exactly what the correct shot is. She can feel it — her body finds the right rhythm when she lets it. But the moment she recognizes caution as the answer, something overrides the knowledge. Something older than her professional training. Something that saysslow is the same as surrender.
She doesn't lack discipline. She's afraid of it.
I close the laptop. My study in Charleston is quiet at this hour — nine in the evening, the marsh beyond the porch humming with insects, a glass of wine on my desk that I poured forty minutes ago and haven't touched. The walls are lined with course notebooks. Sixty-three of them, spanning every significant course I've played, caddied, or analyzed over the past twenty-five years.
Four of those notebooks are dedicated to Tala Sarmiento.
I did not set out to study her. I set out to study how modern tour players approach risk on courses I'd mapped, and her name kept appearing in the data because she attempted more low-percentage shots per round than any player in the top fifty. She was an outlier so extreme that she skewed my analysis, and instead of removing her from the dataset, I opened a new notebook.
Then a second.
Then a third.
By the fourth, I had stopped pretending this was statistical curiosity.
