Page 4 of Her Coach

Marcus Chen called at nine.

I had known Marcus for eleven years. He had been the Titans’ general manager for eight of them and before that he had been in the front office long enough that I had watched him grow into the job the same way I had grown into mine. We were not friends exactly, but we were something more than colleagues. The kind of men who had been in enough rooms together that you knew what the other one was going to say before he opened his mouth.

“Can you come in?” he asked. Not good morning. Just that.

“Yes,” I said.

I showered and put on a suit and took a car to the arena. Same route I had taken for twenty years. Past the same coffee shop on Forty-Ninth where I had stopped every morning for a decade until the owner retired and his son changed the menu and I stopped going. Past the same parking structure where I had backed into a pillar in 2019 and never told anyone. Past the same intersections I had stopped counting long ago.

The driver had sports radio on low. I did not ask him to change it.

Marcus met me in the conference room on the executive floor, not his office. His office was where we had conversations. The conference room was where the organization made decisions.

He closed the door. We sat across from each other at a table built for twelve. He had a folder in front of him that he did not open. I noticed he had not brought coffee for either of us, which told me this was not going to be a long meeting.

“I want you to know,” he said, “that I pushed back.”

“I know.”

“The board moved faster than I expected. Gerald Hargrove made three calls before nine this morning and once he made those calls there was nothing I could —” He stopped. Pressed his mouth together. Started again. “I want you to know I pushed back.”

“I heard you the first time, Marcus.”

He looked at me. The kind of look that had a lot behind it and wasn’t going to say any of it out loud because we were both professionals and this was a conference room and not the place for the things that actually needed saying. “The statement will go out at noon. We’re calling it mutual.”

“Okay.”

“Your buyout will be processed by end of week. Full amount, no conditions.” A pause. “That was non-negotiable on my end.”

“I appreciate it.”

He nodded. Looked at the folder he still hadn’t opened. “Twenty years is a long time, Colton.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

Neither of us said anything else for a while. Outside the conference room windows the city was doing what it always did, moving and indifferent and completely unaware that in this particular room on this particular morning, something that had taken two decades to build was being quietly disassembled by men in suits who were very good at making it look like nobody’s fault.

Marcus stood first. He held out his hand.

I shook it.

He walked me to the elevator himself. We rode down in silence and parted ways in the lobby without making promises to stay in touch that neither of us would keep. I walked out through the front doors of the building I had walked into almost every day for twenty years and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, not going anywhere in particular.

The city moved around me. Cabs and foot traffic and someone on a bike cutting too close to the curb. Nobody looked at me. Nobody knew. The statement wasn’t out yet.

I hailed a cab and went home.

The statement hit the wire at noon exactly. I read it at my kitchen table with the same coffee I still hadn’t touched, cold now, pushed to the side. Mutual decision. Best interests of the franchise. I read it twice. Put the phone face down. Sat there and looked at the wall.

That was the part nobody told you about. Not the scandal itself. I had braced for that, had stood in that corridor running the math before I ever picked up Dave’s call. What I hadn’t braced for was the texture of what came after. The way the phone stopped ringing not because things had calmed down but because everyone who mattered had already said what they needed to say and stopped waiting. The way twenty years could just stop. No ceremony. No real conversation. A statement issued on your behalf while you sat alone in your kitchen and found out about it the same way everyone else did.

I sat at that table for a long time after.

I kept thinking about the photograph in the catering corridor. Madison Square Garden, 1970s. I had walked past that photograph more times than I could count and never once stopped to look at it. I had been too busy going somewhere. Now I had nowhere to go and all I could think about was a photograph I had never paid attention to.

I poured a bourbon at two in the afternoon. First time in three years I had done that.

I told myself it was a one-time thing.