Page 8 of Gave Proof Through the Night

My phone buzzes before they're even out of sight. It’s my agent:

Mike: Announcement’s locked in. Media week in Irvine starts the week before the DC tournament. I’ll send the full schedule once I have it.

Mike: Did you see the piece in The Athletic?

Mike: Jeremiah.

Mike: Call me.

I run the next few weeks in my head while I walk. Texas first just to hang with the guys, then I’ll pack up my house before putting it on the market. My cousin Nate’s already sending me listings for something on the coast, since he’s twenty minutes from Newport Beach and has apparently appointed himself my local liaison whether I asked or not. He owns an insurance agency in Laguna Beach, so he knows where not to buy a house unless I want to spend ten grand a month just for fire insurance.

Make an offer sometime in the next month. Then the wedding. Then California for the Irvine team press tour and the announcement. Then straight from the coast to DC with no gap in between. Which is fine. Breathing is overrated.

One more text lands.

Mike: One more thing. There’s a gala after the tournament you’re required to attend. Organizers want faces in the room. Bring a plus-one if you’ve got one. Or find one. Fans eat that up.

I imagine Sticky Fingers in a fancy dress… pocketing the silverware.

I don’t know where that came from.

Me: noted. calling you from the car.

I don’t have a plus-one. I don’t have time for a plus-one.

I order an Uber in the app. My flight’s not for a few hours yet, but the first-class lounge has sashimi and I’ve decided I’m starved. I’m running at approximately fourteen percent battery and my body is aware of this and my brain refuses to cooperate with the shutdown.

The photoshoot had been tedious but necessary. My jaw still hurts from smiling the whole time.

It’s fine.

The Irvine announcement is seven weeks out and it’s fine.

The pickpocket somehow short-circuited my higher functions for thirty-seven seconds, and that is, categorically… fine. I guess.

I’d expected her to wiggle out of my loose grip and run.

She hadn’t run.

She’d squared up at me with those freckles and that devil-may-care expression and told me it was a nice day. Something so pedestrian and mundane.

Such moxie.

Okay. I think I understand why she’s in my head.

She isn’t anything, I tell myself. She’s a stranger.

I will not think about her freckles. I will not think about those brown eyes. Or that cute little scar on her eyebrow. I will definitely not spend any more time thinking about a girl who tried to steal a watch that doesn’t even work. A girl I’ve, for some reason, named Sticky Fingers that I will never see again.

3

ERICA

Chapter playlist:

Sloppy Soup Samba — Daniel Pemberton

Ain't No Rest for the Wicked — Cage The Elephant