Page 152 of Gamebreaker

I meant it. That was the worst part. I meant it so completely that it felt like pressing my own thumb into an open wound, and I sent it anyway, because I needed her to know, even now, even like this, that I was on her side.

She didn't answer.

I watched the word Delivered sit under the message. At 12:09, it changed to Read.

I deleted Instagram off my phone and sat at the counter until two in the morning, turning the hair tie around and around on my wrist.

Somewhere in those two hours, I stopped thinking about whether to do it.

I started thinking about how.

Bianca Bardot's office was on the fourteenth floor of a building in the financial district, all floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of Fashion City designed to impress whoever sat across her desk. I'd sat in that chair dozens of times. Contract negotiations, endorsement deals, and the occasional cleanup when an interview went sideways.

Bianca had been my agent for nine years. She was fifty-one, decisive, and had negotiated contracts worth more than the GDP of a few island nations combined. She did not rattle.

I told her on Monday morning, before I could lose my nerve over another weekend.

I watched her face while I said it. She set down her coffee and pulled her notepad toward her.

"Okay," she said. "When?"

Not surprise. Not concern. Just when. Nine years of working together, and she'd apparently been waiting for this conversation longer than I had.

"As soon as possible."

She wrote a note. "That's fast. You're sure you're ready?"

"I've been hiding for twelve years," I said. "I'm sure."

What followed was an hour of logistics, delivered plainly and without padding. Some sponsors would likely walk. There was no predicting which until it happened. The media would make it a story whether I took part or not, which was why she strongly recommended we control the first word ourselves. Some fans would be supportive. Some would be cruel. Most would care for a news cycle and then go back to caring about my assists.

And my legacy. This would be part of it now. Permanently, written into the record of who Cameron Russo was.

"You'll be an out athlete," Bianca said, "in addition to everything else you've built. It doesn't replace any of that. It becomes part of it."

"Good," I said, and found that I meant it.

She looked at me then, really looked, the way she occasionally did when the conversation was about more than contracts. "Are you doing this for someone?"

I thought about giving her the clean answer. For myself. For my mental health. For the integrity of my public image. All of it was true.

"I'm doing it for me," I said. "But yes. There's someone. Someone I hurt by being too scared." I looked down at the hair tie on my wrist. "Someone I might have already lost."

Bianca's face didn't change, but she tapped her pen once against the notepad.

"Then make it count."

We settled on a plan. No press conference. No sit-down interview with a sympathetic journalist who'd frame it as a redemption arc. My words, my account, my terms. One post.

Next Monday morning. The morning of Game 1 of the Finals.

"You want to come out on the biggest day of the season thus far," Bianca said slowly.

"I want to play that game as myself," I said. "I've never played one like that."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she wrote MONDAY at the top of the page and underlined it twice.

I drove home with the windows down even though the air had turned cool, because I needed to feel more than the climate-controlled hush of that office. The city moved past me in the late morning light, and I let myself sit inside what I'd just committed to.