Page 58 of The Tiger in the Sack

Clover came in behind her. She read the room. She saw me. Something moved through her face fast enough that most people would have missed it.

I didn’t miss it.

She sat down next to Gabrielle, opened her laptop, and looked at Coach. “What did I miss?”

“Here’s what I think,” Coach said. “Monty expected to run this team. He didn’t get it. So now he’s going to make sure the person who did can’t hold onto it. And he’s not going to put his own fingerprints on any of it if he can help it.”

Gabrielle had her hands flat on her knees. She was looking at Coach like she’d been carrying something alone for eight weeks and someone had just taken hold of the other end.

Gabrielle swiped her hand down her face. “I kept telling myself I was being⁠—”

“You weren’t,” Coach said. Simple. Certain.

“I saw it the first day, in your office,” Clover said.

The room was quiet for a second. She still hadn’t looked at me. But she was here, in it, which Coach had made happen because I’d said her name out loud in a room and not been able to stop myself, and I decided I’d take it. Whatever this was. A woman who didn’t date football players, sitting four feet away, on the same side of a fight she didn’t know I’d asked her into.

It wasn’t a door opening. But it wasn’t the door closing, either.

I’d take it.

“Okay.” Coach set down his cookie. That was a big deal. “Last time, I told you boys to keep your eyes open. That’s done. Eyes open didn’t stop a woman with a purse full of car-horn dogs from trying to annex an entire department in front of God and everybody.”

Gabrielle put a hand up. “Before anybody gets ahead of themselves, I’m not going to fire him.” She said it flat, like she was laying a tool on the table. “I can’t. Not on a feeling and a nudged camera. The second I move on Monty without proof, I’m the new owner who couldn’t handle the job. That’s the story he’s building.”

“So we don’t give it to him,” Coach said. “We stop watching and start writing things down. Every helpful little concern. Every camera that takes a nap. Every time something goes suspiciously wrong.” He tapped the legal pad. “Nobody plays a card until we can win the hand.”

Gabrielle was nodding, weeks of carrying it alone draining out of her shoulders in real time.

Everyone turned, without quite meaning to, toward Clover.

“Can I say something that might be paranoid.”

“We’re fresh out of paranoid in here,” Coach said. “I think we’re on the same page. Spill it and I’ll nod along. Floor’s yours.”

“Monty hates what Gabi and I are building.” She said it slowly, like she was checking her math in her head. “Not the squad. The direction of it and how well it’s working. The recruiting numbers, the video, the kind of women showing up to try out. All of it is the new owner being right about something he would never do.”

Gabrielle took a breath and narrowed her eyes. “I always knew he wouldn’t like the idea.”

Clover leaned back in her chair. “And then your sister, who has never once cared about the back office of the team or cheer, walks in thinking she can run it. Doesn’t that feel like a lot of coincidence for one Wednesday?”

“Mm-hmm.” Coach touched his nose and then pointed at Clover. “There it is.”

The room went quiet in a new way.

Gabrielle sat back. Whatever she’d walked in braced for, it hadn’t been that. “You think Monty sent her.”

Coach took a bite of his cookie and stared at Clover waiting for her to bring it home.

“I think men who hate losing find someone louder to lose it for them.” Clover stood, ready to leave. “But I’m not going to make the team smaller and quieter to keep the peace. I’ve spent my whole life being told a room wasn’t built for me. I got real good at building my own.”

Clover picked up one of Coach’s cookies, and walked out.

Rutherford exhaled. “I’d run through a wall for her.”

“Get in line,” I said, before my brain could stop me.

Three heads turned toward me. I pulled out my phone and pretended to stare down at it like I’d been doing that the whole time and hadn’t said anything.