Page 164 of Full Contact

“I did. They used it anyway.”

Downstairs, I walked out onto Sixth Avenue and into the lunch crowd. It was warm, and the sidewalk was full of people carrying sandwiches back to their desks. A man was selling pretzels from a cart on the corner.

I stood at the curb with my phone in my hand. Trier was coming tomorrow. I could wait impatiently at the hotel, have coffee with him at ten, and explain everything.

I opened the airline app.

There was a flight that afternoon, landing at O’Hare at four ten. One seat remained, in the back row by the bathroom. Trier had treatment until five. If the flight was on time, I had a chance of catching him at the practice facility.

I booked it in the cab back to the hotel.

Upstairs, I packed the shirt I’d hung up that morning. At checkout, the woman asked whether everything had been all right with my stay.

“It was,” I said. “I’m going home early.”

The flight was full and warm. The man next to me ate a sandwich out of wax paper over Pennsylvania and fell asleep by Ohio. I left the laptop in my bag. Nothing about the job needed more thought.

What I didn’t know was what Trier would say.

He’d asked to see me. That didn’t mean he’d changed his mind.

I looked out the window at the clouds over Indiana.

We landed eleven minutes early. I walked to short-term parking with my bag over my shoulder and found the car where I’d left it the day before.

Somewhere between Montrose and Addison, I tried an opening line:

“I’ve had some time to reconsider.”

I said it out loud at the next light. It sounded like I was calling a meeting to order. I let it go.

I loved Trier. I’d known it since I’d sat in an emergency vet clinic at six in the morning with his cat asleep on my hands.

I’d still wanted him when I agreed to end our relationship. I’d wanted him when he held my coat, and I took it out of his hands.

That hadn’t changed.

I didn’t text him from the car. He’d already asked to see me. I was only arriving a day early.

At five oh five, I pulled into the staff side of the facility’s parking lot. Trier’s car was still in the players’ spaces, three rows over.

I turned off the engine. Then I grabbed my bag off the back seat, because I didn’t know where I was spending the night, and I walked across the lot toward the entrance.

Chapter twenty-five

Trier

The morning of Mark’s interview, the locker room smelled like coffee and fresh tape. Danny had stuck the newspaper’s front page to the whiteboard with magnets. We were headed to the Cup Final.

Varga had theories about how Peaches had called the series. The first involved which way her head pointed in an old photograph. He’d moved on to the second.

“Somebody counted the tassels on her cushion in the birthday episode.” He held up his phone. “Six tassels. We won in six. That is solid science.”

“That’s my cushion,” I said. “It has eight tassels. Two are underneath.”

“You’re ruining science.”

Larsson leaned over from his stall. “How’s she holding up, Trier? Big week.”