Page 36 of The Lion in the Library

He did not look like that now.

He was not, I thought, writing the football book. Or not only. There was something different in the energy of it, something that felt less like excavation and more like invention — less like a man accounting for a life and more like a man making something new. I didn’t know what it was. I was curious. I filed it away with the other things I was curious about, the things that belonged to the future we were now, apparently, actually building.

I gathered my bag and my script and my keys. At the door I paused. Through the kitchen doorway I could still see him — the morning light on the table, the pages turning, León on the chair beside him because Luz had left him there as a supervisory measure, the particular quality of a person doing the thing they were always meant to do.

I had moved across a country with two children and very little certainty to become a different version of myself, one that was more honest and less performed, more afraid and also less. I had not expected, in the middle of that project, to find someone else in the same process. I had not expected to recognize him so readily. I had not expected to find, in a library of all places, a man who was also trying to figure out who he was when no one was watching.

We had both been looking, I thought. We had simply found each other before we’d finished.

I let myself out quietly, and went to be an actress in Hollywood, and left Leo Ramírez in my kitchen, writing something true.

THE LAST ROAR

LEO

Game days had always followed a strict routine.

Wake before the alarm. Light breakfast — nothing that would sit heavy. Forty minutes of quiet, which I had called meditation in interviews and which was actually closer to argument, the internal kind, running scenarios, rehearsing decisions until they felt inevitable rather than chosen. Pre-game meal at eleven. Focus exercises. Warm-up. Play.

Sixteen years. The ritual had become so ingrained I could do it half-asleep, which I sometimes had.

Today’s routine included one additional item: a stop, early, at a jeweler on Wilshire who had spent three weeks executing my very specific design brief and who presented the finished ring with the gravity of someone who understood they had done something worth doing.

I stood at the counter looking at it for longer than was probably professional.

“It’s exactly right,” I said.

He allowed himself a small smile. “Yes. I thought so too.”

I tucked the box into my jacket pocket and went to meet Hunter.

He was waiting outside the stadium entrance, coffee in hand, sunglasses on despite the cloud cover, which was a Hunter De la Reine affectation I had long since stopped questioning.

“You have the ring,” he said. Not a question — he could apparently read it on me.

“I have the ring.”

“And you’re proposing at the press conference.”

“After the children’s part, yes.”

Hunter drank his coffee. He had the expression he got when he was running numbers — not actively alarmed, but conducting a rapid internal assessment of risk versus return. “The optics are going to be extraordinary,” he said finally. “Retirement, Olympic coaching appointment, proposal to a telenovela star, in front of the entire press corps. Leo, this is going to be the sports story of the decade.”

“That’s not why I’m doing it.”

“I know that’s not why you’re doing it. I’m telling you it’s going to happen anyway, and you should be prepared.” He paused. “She’ll say yes.”

“I know she’ll say yes.”

“I know you know. I’m saying it anyway because that’s what I’m here for.” He finished his coffee. “How’s the book?”

I had been waiting for this. Hunter asked about the book with the regularity of someone monitoring an investment, which it was, technically — he had negotiated the advance and was acutely aware of the ongoing overdue situation.

“The book has changed,” I said.

He lowered his sunglasses. “Changed.”

“I’ve been writing something different. For the past several months, actually. The memoir wasn’t — it wasn’t the right form for what I was trying to say. But there’s something else that might be.”