Page 31 of The Tiger in the Sack

That had been a clean, sensible explanation on Monday.

On Friday it was developing cracks.

Because Kingman crouched down to the toddlers’ level the second he got near them — no performance to it, no glance at Dev’s camera, just a tall man folding himself down to where a four-year-old was attempting a forward roll, and he said, with total gravity, “You’ve got to commit. Halfway is how you land on your head. Ask me how I know.”

The kid actually asked him how he knew.

“Because I have landed on my head,” Kingman laughed and said, “approximately fourty-hundred thousand times.”

And something in my chest tripped.

Don’t. Do not do this.

I had learned the lesson where I wanted something so badly my brain started pouring the bridge before it checked the load.

Here was the counter-data, and I require data so that the engineering brain I’d trained for the last four years could take over. Lots of athletes were charming. Self-deprecation was the entire house style of sports media. My own father has dined out on it for three decades.

He was using his fame as a tool.

He was nothing like the mystery man I’d been crushing on all week even though I hadn’t even seen his face.

If Isak Kingman, the most-watched man in Cincinnati, was Cat Daddy then anonymity would be the one thing on earth he could never actually have.

It didn’t add up. Almost. It almost didn’t add up, and the almost was the whole problem. I stood there in Zahra’s studio running structural analysis on a man crouched among toddlers and could not get the numbers to either close or fall apart.

Suspect. I could get to suspect. I could not get to sure, and the not-sure had teeth.

Then a sweet grandma sidled up to Kingman with a Gatorade cup and asked him to sign it, and he did, easy, and she said something I didn’t catch, and he laughed, and then he said, loud enough to carry, loud enough that Dev’s camera swung toward him like a sunflower finding the sun:

“Ma’am, I appreciate it, but I don’t think this program’s looking for guys like me. I’m all hands and no choreography.”

The room roared.

“I’d rather see people like you and these ladies who actually know how to dance cheering me on.”

Dev got it. The red light, the swing, a moment that was going to be the entire launch video happening in real time on a floor in a suburb called Avondale. The man had just, without seeming to know he was doing it, made a joke about himself, and made it land as an invitation instead of a wound.

“You’re holding that clipboard like it owes you money,” Zahra said, materializing at my elbow.

I looked down. I was holding my laminated run-of-show against my sternum with both hands, like a breastplate. Like a woman who’d felt a room reorganize itself around a man and reached for the nearest load-bearing object.

“Why are you looking at Kingman like a math problem? It’s good that he’s here, isn’t it? Shows the Tigers are behind this and not just the owner.”

“I’m not.”

“You absolutely are. I can practically see that meme with the crazy math drawings swirling over your head.”

He was making his way over. Of course he was, crossing a room that had parted for him without his asking it to, the way rooms do for some people and have never once in my life done for me, and he had a smile starting, easy and open, the smile of a man who has never walked into a room that didn’t want him.

“Hi,” he said, arriving. “Clover Freeman, right? We met Monday. This is incredible, what you’re doing here. The turnout.”

Up close the snag in my brain between Isak Kingman and Cat Daddy got worse. Or better. I genuinely could not tell which, and the not-being-able-to-tell was its own small catastrophe.

“I’m just the one with the clipboard.”

Something flickered across his face. Interest, maybe, or recognition, or my own want painting recognition onto a perfectly ordinary expression, I had no way to know — and he said, “That’s a very specific way to not take credit for an event you’re obviously running for a cause that is clearly important to you.”

For a split second I wished I was the one wearing a helmet. It was…like a harsh flashlight shining in the dark directly at me to be seen so easily like that.