She saw the worst of my machinery and she stood beside my bag anyway and she saidgood girlin a voice that made me believe the word applied to something more than my putting stroke.
And when she asked me — directly, with her eyes on mine and her wrist in my grip and her body against the wall — whether I trusted that she had never used our relationship to manipulate my strategy, I hesitated.
One second.
One second in which the woman who wroteshe does not trust herself without an audiencewatched me fail to trust her without an audience of sponsors and officials and media voices confirming that trust was safe.
One second in which I proved the assessment correct.
My phone buzzes at three forty-seven in the morning.
A text from Nerys.
I'm withdrawing from the trial. You are a remarkable player. I hope you find the caddie you deserve. I will not answer calls or messages for the foreseeable future.
I read the text. I set the phone on the nightstand.
The note is still on my screen. The paragraph. The handwriting. The most honest thing anyone has ever written about me.
She does not trust herself without an audience.
She's right. She's right about all of it. She was right about my tempo and my grip pressure and my tendency to pull my right foot back before committing to an aggressive line. She was right about the 7-iron and the center-green and the wind at Kiawah and the slopes at St Andrews.
She was right about me.
And I punished her for it.
I lie on the bed. The ceiling is white. The air conditioning hums. The Pacific crashes against the cliffs below the hotel, indifferent to the wreckage occurring in a room above it.
I close my eyes.
I don't sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nerys
Charleston is quiet in the way that a room is quiet after someone has left it — not silent but emptied, the sound of absence filling the space where presence used to be.
I have been home for four days. The routine is deliberate: I wake at six, drink coffee on the porch, walk the marsh path for an hour, return, review the news cycle for my name, close the browser, and spend the remainder of the day not watching golf.
The not-watching is a discipline I enforce upon myself with the same rigor I once brought to tournament preparation. The television remains off. The ESPN app remains closed. The Golf Channel's live stream remains unbookmarked in my browser. I do not need to know what is happening at the US Women's Open at Oakmont because what is happening at Oakmont is no longer my professional concern.
Tala is playing the final major of the season without me.
This is the correct outcome. The investigation is ongoing. My presence on the bag would constitute a distraction that serves neither her game nor the process. I withdrew voluntarily, exercised the contractual termination clause that Phaedra designed for exactly this purpose, and returned to the house in Charleston where the clubs are in their labeled slots and thenotebooks are on their shelves and the empty shelf in the corner of the club room holds nothing.
I have not spoken to Tala in eleven days.
She has called fourteen times. Left seven voicemails. Sent twenty-three text messages. I have read every message. I have listened to every voicemail. I have not responded.
The messages follow a progression I should have predicted.
The first three are urgent —Nerys please call me, I need to explain, the hesitation didn't mean what you think it meant.The next four are longer, more measured — she's had time to process, and the messages contain the kind of specific emotional analysis that suggests she's been working with Dr. Oona.I understand why the hesitation mattered. I understand that one second of doubt from me carried the weight of ten years of doubt from everyone else. I'm not asking you to forgive the hesitation. I'm asking you to let me show you what comes after it.
The most recent messages are short. One sentence each.
I miss you.
