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Short passes, long passes, rollouts to the left and the right, the same throws he’d been making twice a day in Miami. His arm felt good. His legs felt good. Halfway through, he stopped thinking about the men on the sidelines with their clipboards and just played catch with Kirby and a couple of receivers he’d been throwing to for four years, and that was when it got easy.

The last throw was the long one. He dropped back, set his feet, and put it up as high and as far as he could. It came down right over Kirby’s shoulder at the far end of the field without him ever breaking stride.

The building was quiet for a second. Then one of the scouts on the sideline said, “Jesus Christ,” under his breath, and somebody else laughed, and the general manager in the camel coat wrote something down for the first time all day.

Drew looked up at the bleachers.

Nicole was on her feet. Bailey was on her feet. Lauren was on her feet, yelling something he couldn’t make out. And Nicole had both hands cupped around her mouth, and she was screaming his name loud enough that half the scouts turned around to see who it was.

Five weeks until the draft.

He grinned up at her, and she grinned right back, and for once in his whole life, Drew wasn’t scared of anything.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Her mother never called with bad news.

That was Tiffany’s job. It had been Tiffany’s job for as long as Nicole could remember. When Mama Gussie fell and broke her wrist, it was Tiffany who called. When the tabloid came out, it was Tiffany. Roxanne Wright called on Sunday afternoons to ask if Nicole was eating, and on birthdays, and on the first day of every semester to remind her to sit near the front of the room. She did not call on a Thursday at eleven in the morning.

So when Nicole picked up the cordless in her studio and heard her mother say “Nicole,” just her name, and nothing after it, she knew before anything else got said.

She set her brush down on the edge of the worktable. “Mama? What’s wrong? Is it Mama Gussie?”

“No, baby. Mama Gussie’s fine. Everybody’s fine.” Her mother took a breath. Nicole could hear it, slow and careful. “The results came back this morning. The paternity test.”

Nicole sat down on the stool.

She’d known the baby was due sometime in March, and she hadn’t let herself think about it once. There was nothing to think about. The test was going to come back, and it was going to say what her dad had been saying since September, and then everybody could stop.

“Okay,” she said.

“He’s the father.”

Nicole looked at the canvas in front of her. It was the woods behind her mother’s house the way they looked in October, half the trees done in rust and gold, the sky not painted in yet.

“No,” she said.

“Baby.”

“No. That’s not right. Those tests are wrong all the time, Mama. They mix things up. Somebody at the lab . . . he said it wasn’t his. He said it from the beginning.” She was talking too fast. She could hear herself doing it. “Did they do it twice? They should do it twice.”

“Nicole.” Her mother’s voice didn’t change. It was still soft and still steady, and that was the worst part. Nicole could tell her mother had already gotten her tears out of the way somewhere else, hours ago, and pulled herself back together before she ever picked up the phone. “Ninety-nine point nine percent. The lawyers called me at eight. It’s his.”

Nicole squeezed her eyes shut.

It was so quiet in the studio. She could hear the clock in the kitchen downstairs, and a lawn mower somewhere down the street, and her own breathing, which didn’t sound like her.

The Ritz-Carlton. Thanksgiving morning, the room service on the table by the window, French toast he’d ordered for her because he knew it was her favorite. She’d asked him. She’d made herself ask him, because she’d needed to hear it in person, and he had looked straight at her. He hadn’t looked away and he hadn’t blinked. Nicole, I never slept with that woman. And she’d believed him so completely that she’d left that hotel more sure of him than she’d been in weeks. She’d brought him a plate that night. She’d stood in her mother’s driveway wishing he could come inside.

“He looked right at me,” she said. “Mama, he looked me right in my face and swore to me.”

Her mother was quiet for a second. “Baby,” she said, “he’s been looking all of us in the face for a long time.”

Nicole didn’t understand it. She heard it, every word, and none of it went in. “What do you mean, all of us?”

“Nothing. I shouldn’t have . . .” Her mother stopped. “It’s not important right now.”

“What does that mean, Mama?”