Outside, the marsh breathes. The water moves through the grass. The insects maintain their ancient, unselfconscious song.
I close my eyes. I rest my hands on the woman I chose.
I sleep.
EPILOGUE
Tala
One Year Later
I am ranked third in the world, and the woman I live with has just discovered that I moved her putter.
"Tala."
Her voice carries from the club room to the kitchen, where I'm eating a protein bar and pretending to read Bisi's latest sponsorship email. The voice is the one she uses when she's identified a problem and has located its source — measured, precise, and carrying the particular vibration of a woman whose organizational principles have been violated.
"Tala Sarmiento."
Full name. Elevated stakes.
I take another bite of the protein bar and wait.
Nerys appears in the kitchen doorway. She's wearing a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows and dark trousers and her hair is pushed behind her ears and the silver streak is catching the late-afternoon light through the kitchen window. She looks like a woman who has recently returned from a strategy session with her consulting clients — the two retired players and the former collegiate coach who now work under the small firm she launched six months ago, specializingin course management and mental pacing for athletes who have discovered that talent without structure is a beautiful car with no steering.
She also looks like a woman who is about to prosecute a crime.
"The driver is in the 3-wood slot."
"Is it?"
"The 3-wood is in the 5-iron slot."
"How strange."
"And the putter — my personal, custom-fitted, thirty-four-inch blade putter that I have used for eleven years — is in the wedge rack."
"Climate change."
"Climate change."
"Things are shifting everywhere, Nerys. The environment is unstable. Equipment migrates."
She crosses her arms. The posture is familiar — I've seen it on a hundred courses, in a dozen countries, during every conversation in which she's about to present evidence that my decision-making is flawed. But the expression beneath the posture has changed since the first year. It's warmer now. The severity is still there — Nerys Quillan will never fully abandon severity the way the Pacific will never fully abandon the California coast — but it's underwritten by something that wasn't present when I met her.
Amusement. Specifically, the amusement of a woman who loves the person annoying her and has accepted that the annoyance is part of the contract.
"This is a terminable offense," she says.
"Show me the clause."
"Subsection four, paragraph nine. Deliberate equipment disorder."
"That's not a real subsection."
"It will be by morning." She uncrosses her arms. "Come here."
"Make me."
