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"Game's at seven."

"Game's at seven," I confirmed.

"That's twelve hours from now, and you've been awake since the middle of the night." She shook her head into my shoulder. "This is why athletes are the way they are."

"The way they are?"

"You know. Intense. Particular. Incapable of lying in bed like a normal person."

"I'm going to win today," I said.

She lifted her head and looked at me.

"I know you are," she said. "And I need you to hear this, because I'm only going to say it once before you leave, and then I'm going to be very normal and annoying for the rest of the day." She took my hand and turned it over so that my wrist was facing up, the hair tie sitting on the line of numbers. She pressed her thumb over both. "You don't have to be anybody today. Not the captain. Not the brand. Not the story everybody's going to write tomorrow. You just have to be Cam. And Cam is the best person who ever happened to me. So just go be her."

I couldn't say anything.

"And if anyone, anywhere, says one cruel word about you on the internet today," she added, "I have a large enough following to cause minor damage and no impulse control, and I will handle it."

The laugh broke out of me so hard I had to put my coffee down.

"There she is," Harper said, smiling, the dimple appearing. "Go be magnificent, Cam. I'll be the one in the stands embarrassing you loudly."

"Please don't yell anything at the court."

"I'm going to yell that's a pick-and-roll every time you do one, and point at you, so everyone around me knows I understand what's happening."

"You are describing a nightmare, Harper."

"I'm describing enthusiasm. It's the exact same energy, but with better intentions."

At 9:15, I picked up my bag. She walked me to the front door in my shirt and her bonnet, and I stopped on the threshold, and she reached up and fixed the collar of my jacket, even though it didn't need fixing.

"I'll see you at halftime," she said. "Look courtside."

"I'll look."

"You better."

I kissed her, long and slow, the taste of coffee warm on her lips, her hands coming up to grip my wrists the way they'd started to, holding on.

Then I walked out the front door into the daylight and didn't check the street.

For the first time in twelve years, I was leaving my heart at home, and I knew exactly where to find it.

The locker room before a Finals game had its own particular electricity. It was contained and charged with the noise of twenty people who'd been building toward this exact night for a whole season, who understood what was at stake and had chosen to meet it instead of flinching.

My team looked at me differently now.

Not badly. Not with pity or awkwardness or any of the reactions I'd spent an entire career bracing for. They looked at me the way they always had, with the respect that comes from years of shared work and shared wins. But there was an addition. A look that said, we see you. Not just Captain Russo in full uniform with her game face on. The person underneath it, the one who'd stood in this same room five days ago and told the truth, and had somehow, astonishingly, still been their captain when she was done.

"You ready, Cap?" Destiny asked, lacing her shoes.

"More than."

She grinned. "Good. I've been waiting to see what you look like when you play free."

I thought about that while I taped my wrists. I touched the two rings on the chain around my neck, the way I had before every game for eight years. Then I unclasped it and hung it on its hook inside my locker, because jewelry doesn't go on the court.