Page 196
"Writing a caption, Captain Miserable," she said.
"You could've missed the end of the game, Instagram."
"I watched every single second." She pushed off the wall. "I'm going to be insufferable about it for the rest of our lives. I'm going to explain pick-and-rolls to strangers at parties."
"What's the caption?"
She held out her phone.
The photo from the court. Our faces. The big screen above us. My name on both of us. And underneath it, in her careful lowercase, three words:
throw ball good
I laughed so hard I had to put my hand on the wall.
"It's perfect," I said, when I could.
"I know." She tucked her phone into her back pocket and looked up at me. "It's also the last caption I'm writing tonight. I'm done performing for anybody. I just want to go home."
Home.
She'd said it without thinking, without any weight on it, sort of like it was just the word for wherever I was.
I looked down at the hair tie on my wrist, sitting over the coordinates of a kitchen in Providence where my mother had held me at twenty-two and told me she knew. I'd put those numbers on my skin when I was homesick and young and alone in a new city, so I'd always know where home was.
I'd been wrong about that too. Home wasn't a set of coordinates.
Home was a woman in a tunnel who looked up from her phone.
"Harper," I said. "Can I walk you to the car?"
She went very still.
She knew. I could see that she knew. I'd told her on her couch, at one in the morning, with the string lights on, about the list I made in my kitchen. Everything I'd already lost. The one line under her name that I hadn't been able to finish writing without stopping.
Walking her to the car.
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes, Cam. Please."
I held out my hand. She put hers in it.
And I walked her to the car.
Through the corridor, past the security guards, one of them in a yellow jacket who nodded at us and held the door. Out into the players' lot, where a crowd of fans had gathered along the barrier, calling my name, phones held up high, a hundred little lights in the dark. I didn't look away from them. I didn't drop her hand. I didn't check who was watching. I lifted our joined hands and waved at them with hers, and the sound they made followed us all the way across the lot.
I opened the passenger door for her. She didn't get in right away. She stood in the open door and looked up at me, under the parking lot lights, in the cool fall air, with my name on her back and her hand still in mine.
"You know what tomorrow is?" she said.
I thought about it. Game 2 was Wednesday. Tomorrow was film and recovery and ice baths and Bianca's phone calls and a world that would have opinions about all of it. But I knew what she was getting at. I always did.
"Tuesday," I said, smiling warmly.
Her eyes filled. "Tuesday."
"Tell me about it," I said. "Your Tuesday. I want to hear it again."
"Oat milk latte, extra shot," she said, smiling through it. "The barista spells my name wrong. I take claims for eight hours and communicate with Mia telepathically. I stop at the grocery store and lose the fight with the expensive cheese."