Page 12 of Takedown

"Danny."

"Hey, Pop."

"What's wrong."

Eighteen years, and he could hear it in two words. I looked at the letter. I looked at the Ledger on its stand, all those dead rich men in fountain pen, and I didn't tell him. He had thirty years and two fingers in that building behind him. He didn't need to carry my rent too.

"Nothing. Wanted to hear the shift whistle."

Pause. The mill roared, far away.

"You eating enough?"

"Yeah."

"You winning?"

"Not yet."

"Then what are you calling me for," he said, and there was a smile in it, the whole gruff love of him in five words. Then, quieter: "You belong there, Danny. Don't let them tell you different." A beat. "Don't you tell you different."

I sat with the phone gone dark in my hand and the mill still roaring in my memory's ear. He hadn't asked what was wrong a second time. That's my father's whole religion, right there: he asks once, and if you say nothing he lets you keep it, because a man's allowed to carry his own weight and it's an insult to lift it off him before he's set it down himself. He'd carried his own for thirty years. Widower, welder, state champ in a bracket nobody up this hill would've deigned to notice. He built me out of not-complaining and the ugly double leg and one sentence he'd said at the door of every tournament since I was seven — go get what's yours — and I'd spent eighteen years trying to have a single thing that was mine to go get.

Now I did. It was a starting spot at 174 pounds in a basement in New Hampshire, and the only thing standing on it was a boy whose grip I could feel in my pulse from clear across a dark room, whose offer stands I was still, hours later, turning over like a coin I couldn't figure out how to spend.

The hell of it is— I thought, and then I did the exact thing I'd sworn off at that fountain three hours earlier: I didn't finish the sentence. Left it lying on the mat with the letter and all the dead rich men in the Ledger. Some sentences you don't finish because you can't. This was the other kind — the kind you don't finish because you already know how it ends, and you are nowhere near ready to have known it.

After we hung up I sat on the mat a long time, doing the math on the floor of the one honest room in New Hampshire.

One starting spot at 174. The letter said the spot or the bus home. And the man standing between me and the spot was the man whose grip lived in my pulse now. Whose do it again I heard when the room got too quiet. Who'd stopped drilling twice today because he could hear something wrong in my hands.

For three weeks I'd been telling myself the oldest lie in the building — that whatever ran between us at the wrists was the season, was adrenaline, was hate. The letter simplified my life. Whatever it was, it was now attached to a man I needed to take everything from.

Eleven weeks.

Starting tomorrow, he wasn't a problem. He was the obstacle. Starting tomorrow I'd stop hearing his sentences at the wrists, stop watching him seat his straps, stop cataloguing him like something I was going to be tested on.

Starting tomorrow.

I sat in the half dark of the Pit, holding a letter with a crest on it, and even I didn't believe me.

Chapter 6 — DANNY

"It's dinner," Miles said, for the third time, walking backward across the quad so he could grin at me while he talked. "Food. On plates. You've seen plates."

"I've got film to watch."

"You've watched more film than Halloran. Come on, Kovac. Thursday nights are guest nights, I'm allowed one civilian, and you're the most interesting person on this team who isn't me." He spread his arms, boat shoes planted in the gold grass like he owned the light too. Maybe he did. Miles Bellamy was the only person at that school who was exactly the same on both sides of the basement door, and I still hadn't decided whether that made him the realest one there or the best liar of all of us.

"Fine. One dinner."

"One dinner," he agreed, delighted, like he'd won something. Which — I'd understand later — he thought he had. Miles collected people the way the school collected names. The difference was, he meant it.

I own one blazer. It came from Kowalski's Menswear on Main Street in Brandt Hollow, bought two sizes big when I was sixteen so it would last, and it has been to every funeral, wake, and awards banquet my family attended in three years. Steel towns bury a lot of people; the blazer had seen work. I put it on in front of our little mirror while Toby watched from his desk with scientific interest.

"You look like you're going to a parole hearing," he said.

"Thanks, Toby."