Page 93 of The Tiger in the Sack

“That I’m all in,” I said. “On her. That it stopped being a deal somewhere before it was even a deal. I’ve been pretending that I agree with all her rules like an end date. I am so far past the edge of this that I can’t see the edge anymore, and I haven’t said it out loud until right now, on a balcony, to my brother, like a coward.”

“Yeah,” Chris said. “That tracks.”

“That’s it? That tracks?”

“Yeah. Ask me how I know.” He said it to the river, easy, a man who’d made it to the far side of the exact bridge I was standing on. “Trixie and I spent a half a summer calling it an arrangement while I’d already fallen so hard I rewrote my whole life around her. For ten fucking years, kid. I know the edge you can’t see. I’ve stood on it. Hell, I bungie jumped off of it.”

He finally looked at me. “The deal isn’t the problem, Isak. The deal’s how it started. Plenty of real things start as pretend. The problem is the part you’re keeping. You don’t get to be all in on somebody and keep the most important thing from her at the same time. That’s not all in. That’s all in with an exit you built into the floor.”

“I know.” I wasn’t sure I would have truly acknowledged it on my own though.

“Do you? Because you’ve got a whole life full of exits you built into the floor. The LLC that owns this building. The S-corp that has a whole ass gaming empire. The cat account. The. Motorcycle.”

Oh fuck. He knew about the motorcycle? I was going to kill Jules.

“You’re a man who loves in secret so it can’t be taken away, and it has never once occurred to you that loving in secret is just a slower way of not having it.”

The river flowed, the stars at dusk twinkled, and the truth hung in the air.

“Tell her,” Chris said. “All of it. The building. The penthouse she’s standing in. Your real feelings. Before somebody else does, because somebody always does, and the difference between her hearing it from you and her hearing it from anybody else is the difference between a hard conversation and a closed door.”

“What if she closes the door anyway?”

“Then she closes it with all the information, which is the only honest way a door gets closed. You’ll survive it, because you’re brave in ways nobody recognizes, including you.” He pushed off the rail. “Now come back inside. Declan’s accusing your sister of stealing from the bank and Jules is about to commit a crime, and you’re hoarding wheat, and your girl is laughing, and you built a place where all of this could happen at once. That’s not nothing and it’s not something to hide. Notice it.”

I noticed it.

Through the glass, the whole loud beautiful disaster of my family was arranged around a board game in a home I’d built in secret, and Clover was throwing her head back at something Trixie said, and Vito was supervising the rooster crate with deep suspicion, and my father was reading at the head of the table winning nothing and losing nothing and seeing everything.

I was all in. I’d said it out loud. And I was going to tell her.

Tomorrow. After the game.

There it was again. That word. Tomorrow.

I really had to stop doing that.

THREE TRUE WORDS

CLOVER

Ikeep a list in my head of the ways a thing can go wrong, ranked by likelihood, and I review it the way other people check their horoscope, which is to say constantly and with a slightly embarrassed sense that it isn’t helping.

The Tiki problem was item four.

I’d ranked it fourth because items one through three were operational, fixable, mine, the kind of problem an engineer solves with a spreadsheet and a hard look. The squad’s insurance paperwork. The fact that Maya had moved into my apartment over the weekend with two duffel bags and a careful blankness about why, and Quincy had followed three days later, and my place was now a cheerleader commune with Vito Catleone asleep on the folded laundry like a small furious king, and I loved it, and it terrified me how much I loved it.

Those I could work.

Item four I could not work, because item four was a woman who owned half the team and had walked in on something she wasn’t supposed to see and gone quiet in the way that smart dangerous people go quiet, which is to think.

I found out how much she’d been thinking on a Tuesday, in Monty Whyte’s office, where I had been summoned to discuss “squad budget realignment,” and where Tiki Barbra Jackson was already sitting in the good chair when I arrived.

That was the first wrong thing. Tiki did not attend budget meetings. Tiki did not attend anything that didn’t have a step-and-repeat or a cocktail. Tiki in a budget meeting was a shark in a swimming pool, and the only question was whose pool.

“Clover.” Monty smiled the lanyard smile, the reasonable one, the one I’d watched him deploy the day we met while he committed four micro-aggressions he’d never in his life admit to. “Thanks for coming. Sit.”

I sat.