Page 49 of The Reckless Rookie

“Call it off.”

“Call what off? I’m not sure I know what you mean.” And he doesn’t stop there, because the cruelty is in the performance. “Though I did hear the county’s taking a look at some of the placement programs. Routine, I’d imagine. Nothing to worry about if everything’s in order out there.” A pause built like a trap. “It is all in order, isn’t it? Your Mr. O’Sullivan behaving himself?”

There it is. The knife, wrapped in concern, handed to me handle-first so that if I grab it I’m the one who bleeds.

“Goodbye, Sebastian.”

“Give my best to your father,” he says, and I hang up on the sound of him enjoying himself.

He wants me to know it’s him. People never understand men like Sebastian. The point was never to hide it. The point is for me to know exactly who did this and be completely unable to prove a word.

My father walks over from the main house that afternoon, which tells me the water’s higher than even I knew, because Armando Delgado mostly leaves me to run my own place, and when he crosses the hundred and fifty yards between his porch and mine, it’s never about something small.

He stands at my kitchen counter where the letter still sits, and he reads it without picking it up, hands in his pockets, the way he used to read a brief he already knew the ending to.

“Diaz called me last night,” he says.

“Dad.”

“He’s worried, m’ija. He doesn’t say worried. Ramón and I have been friends forty years, and he called at nine at night to ask how the ranch was doing, which he has never cared about, so.” He turns from the letter. “You want to tell me what’s happening, or you want to keep managing me like I’m one of your county people.”

I don’t say anything. That’s answer enough for a man who spent twenty years reading silences from the bench.

“Here’s what’s happening,” he says, gentler, which is worse. “If this review goes badly, if that young man of yours puts one foot wrong while the county’s got a magnifying glass on you, it isn’t your contract. It’s Ramón Diaz’s judgment on the record, in an election year, for vouching for a placement everybody can see coming a mile off. It’s my name, because it’s my ranch and my daughter and my oldest friend all in one sentence in a newspaper nobody’s written yet. You didn’t bet your program on this boy, Catalina.” He taps the letter, once. “You bet mine. And Ramón’s. You bet the whole table and you didn’t tell any of us the stakes had gone up.”

He walks back toward the main house as the light goes, slower than he used to, one hand trailing the fence rail the way he never needed to before, and I stand in the yard and watch him go and feel the weight settle onto me at once, more than I let him see.

Because there’s something I didn’t say to my father. Something I can’t say to anybody.

The loaded gun points at all of it, my program, Diaz’s career, my father’s name, everything three generations built. The loaded gun is a man I can’t stop thinking about. I took Finn as a bet on myself, proof I could run this without the family, without a husband, without anybody. And somewhere in the post-holes and the stolen midnights that bet turned into something with no ledger for it, something I don’t have a word I’m willing to use for, and now what I feel most in the world and the thing that can destroy my whole life are the same person, wearing the same crooked smile, an hour south of here playing a game I can’t stop watching.

If this goes wrong I don’t lose the ranch. I lose the ranch and him.

Or I save the ranch by cutting him loose before he can sink it, which is the same as losing him with my own two hands.

I stand in the dark yard and I feel the old reflex come up in me, the one that’s kept me standing my whole life. Manage it. Contain it. Carry it alone so nobody you love has to feel the weight. Don’t tell him. Telling him makes it his, and makes it real, and gives him a vote in what I can decide more cleanly by myself.

I go inside and I put the letter in the drawer with the other one, and I don’t call him, and I tell myself it’s mercy.

I’ve gotten good at telling myself things in this kitchen.

Chapter twenty-six

Finn

Ifind out Sebastian’s been sniffing around because he wants me to find out. That should have told me something. It didn’t.

The team calls it donor night. It’s a glass room above the concourse full of people who paid enough to touch the season without sweating in it, and every player is expected to make them feel as if the access was personal.

He finds me by the window. Comes over easy, hand out, like we’re going to be friends.

“Finn O’Sullivan. The project.” He says it warm, and it lands like a slap, the project, and his handshake goes a beat too long. “I’ve heard so much. Catalina’s taken quite a personal interest in your rehabilitation.”

Personal. He leans on it just enough.

“And you are?”

“An old friend of the family.” He smiles. “An old friend of Catalina’s. I like to keep an eye on her charity cases. She has such a soft spot for the ones with a temper.”