Page 55 of Knottingley Ever After
“If Cap is fine with it,” he says, with the conversational gravity of a man who has decided this is the line he will be remembered for, “we’re fine with it.”
Murray nods. Linder shrugs and goes back to the toaster. Hargrove, slow, the last to commit, gives me a single dip ofthe chin that I will be watching for the next forty-eight hours regardless.
“Thank you,” I say. “For the unexpected cooperation. And the team play.”
I turn to Iris.
“Follow me. We’ll do the full tour later. For now, you look like a woman who has not sat down since six this morning.”
She nods. Then — and I am not, in this moment, the only person in the room to register it — she does something none of us were expecting.
She bows her head.
Small. A degree. Not the grovel of a person making themselves smaller, but the deliberate, contained gesture of an athlete acknowledging a call that did not have to go her way. Her voice when it comes is low and even and meant for the whole room.
“Thank you. For understanding. And for giving me a chance, despite the Omega thing. I won’t take it for granted.”
The room recalibrates around her, visibly, every man present trying not to be caught visibly recalibrating. Murray looks at Petrov. Petrov looks at the rug. Hargrove’s jaw moves once, the precise unconscious motion of a man swallowing a chirp he had loaded and has just realized would land wrong.
That,the captain in me logs,is a girl who has had to thank rooms for less.
I shoulder her duffel again. Matteo takes the hard-sided case from beside the bench without being asked, Rémi falls in at her other shoulder, and we move as a unit through the shared room toward the back wing of the house in a configuration that does not, at any point, require a single one of us to discuss it.
Interesting.
Our sector’s wing is its own apartment in everything but name. Three bedrooms off a small private hallway. A commonroom with a kitchenette. A back door onto a covered porch with a half-stripped Adirondack chair Rémi has been refinishing since August.
The common room is the inventory of the three of us, laid out unironically.
Rémi’s woodworking bench in the corner, currently holding the unfinished cradle of what I am ninety percent sure is going to be a child’s rocking horse for one of his cousins. Matteo’s back issues of Vogue and Esquire and a French publication I cannot pronounce stacked precisely on the coffee table, dog-eared in the columns rather than the photos, because he reads them and refuses to lie about it. My own candles down the mantel, beeswax in mismatched holders, the steady honey-spice base that, more than any other single smell in this house, is the one I associate with home.
Iris turns a slow circle in the middle of it. Her eyes catalogue every object the way I once watched her catalogue a five-man rush.
“We don’t do initiations here,” I say. “We do movie nights.”
She smirks. “A little voodoo could have been fun. But yeah. Movie nights, I can work with.”
“Good. Settled.”
“Thank you,” she adds, quieter. Then, brightening with the breeziness I have come to suspect is her tell for not wanting to be looked at too long: “Oh — I should give you the paperwork before you go. Patricia made me sign something. Apparently bureaucracy still has needs.”
I check my watch. The coaches’ debrief is in twelve minutes and the rink is across campus, and Declan is many things, but he is not a man who treats a late captain with patience.
“Hand it to me. I’ll run it back over to admin on the way to the meeting.”
She bends to the duffel, rummaging, the small concentration line forming between her brows. Rémi, without a word, pulls a pen from his back pocket and offers it across her shoulder, and she takes it with a flicker of a smile I am suddenly certain he will be replaying internally for the rest of the evening. She drops to one knee, smooths the paper flat against the side of her case, and starts filling boxes with the brisk competence of a person who has filled too many forms in too many cold offices.
She is on the bottom line when she stops.
Her shoulders, the ones that have been carrying her up porch steps and through hostile cafeterias and across foreign quads all afternoon, go down. Not in surrender. Worse. In the specific bone-tired drop of a woman discovering that the thing she just spent the last hour climbing toward had a small print clause at the bottom that she did not check for.
“Fuck.”
Quiet. Almost to herself.
Rémi has gone still. Matteo has stilled with him, the case half-set against the wall, halted mid-motion.
“What,” I say, levelly.
