Page 108 of Her Coach

They didn’t.

I poured a cup and sat down at the kitchen table and pulled up my agent’s contact on my phone. I stared at it for a while. Then I opened a new message to Brynn instead and typed out three words, saw the article, and then sat there looking at them until I deleted them without sending.

She hadn’t seen it yet. I knew that by the way she’d been sleeping when I slipped out. Deep, easy, one arm folded under her cheek. She hadn’t been braced for anything. She was just asleep the way people slept when the day before had been good.

I put my phone face down on the table.

The problem was that I’d spent the past few years doing the right thing and ending up in the same place every time. Alone at a table. Coffee going cold. Trying to figure out how to be less of a liability to the people around me.

I thought about what Brynn had said last night. You sitting at this table deciding for me what I can handle. She hadn’t said it yet — that was still coming, I could feel it — but I already knew she was going to say it, because she was right. She was almost always right about the things that mattered. It was one of the more inconvenient things about her.

My agent texted. Call me before nine.

I called him at eight forty-five.

Dave answered on the first ring, same as always. He went through it fast: the article, the traction it was getting, two calls already from the league office, a reporter outside the Titans’ front office asking for comment about a “pattern.” I let him talk. I already knew most of it. What I needed from him was strategy, not a recap.

“You need to pull back,” Dave said. “Whatever this is with the Caldwell girl — you need to cool it. Publicly, at least. Give the story nothing to feed on.”

I didn’t answer right away. I was watching the back door when I heard the creak of the third stair from the bottom — the one that groaned no matter how carefully you stepped on it. I’d noticed it the second day I was in this rental and never got around to telling the landlord.

She was awake.

I kept my voice level. “I hear you.”

“Colton. This is the same situation. Different city, same setup. You cannot afford another — “

“I said I hear you, Dave.” I kept my eyes on the doorway to the hall. The footsteps had stopped. “Let me think about it.”

I ended the call.

The hallway was quiet. I set the phone down on the table and sat there for a moment, not moving. If she’d heard any of that, she’d heard enough to make it sound worse than it was. Dave’s voice wasn’t exactly subtle on a good day, and this was not a good day.

I turned the phone face down again.

The backyard was gold now, the sun finally clearing the ridge. I’d been sitting here long enough to watch the whole thing happen and I still didn’t have an answer I was comfortable with. I had an answer. Just not a comfortable one.

By the time I heard her moving around upstairs, I’d made my coffee last as long as it was going to.

“Morning,” she said, still half-asleep, padding into the kitchen in my socks and a shirt that was three sizes too big for her. She went straight for the coffee pot without looking at me, which is how I knew she hadn’t checked her phone yet.

“Morning,” I said.

She must have clocked the tone, because she turned around before she even had her coffee in hand. She looked at me the way she always did when she was trying to read me — that slight tilt of the head, eyes working, not saying anything yet. She was smart that way. Brynn never came out swinging. She waited until she had something worth swinging at.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I pushed the coffee cup I’d already poured for her across the table. “There’s something I need to deal with today. Work stuff. I’m going to need to focus on it.”

She didn’t move for the cup. “Work stuff.”

“Yeah.”

She studied me for another second. Long enough that I had to look away. Which was probably the dumbest thing I could have done, because Brynn Caldwell didn’t miss a thing.

“Okay,” she said finally. She picked up the coffee. She didn’t push. She just took her cup back upstairs, and I sat there at the kitchen table and hated every single thing about the next hour of my life before I had to go face it.

I was going to pull back. Give the press nothing new to find. No more photos. No more parking lots. No more hand-holding in public until this blew over. I’d done it before — weathered a story by starving it of oxygen. It worked. It always worked.