Page 7 of Love All
The Hartwells, who’d give because my mother would hear about it if they didn’t. Barred. The Van Ryan Foundation, my godmother’s board. Barred. The man who bought the boathouse, the woman whose name is on the library, the eighty people who answer an Astor email within the hour preciselybecauseit’s an Astor email. Every one of them is a check my last name would be writing. Not me.
He built that rule with a scalpel.Nothing your name didn’t earn.I thought it was a dare. It was a diagnosis, mine, the one I handed him on the court, returned so cleanly I never felt it go in.
I have never raised a dollar in my life. I’ve only everbeenthe dollar.
I test it, because I test everything. I draft the email I could write in my sleep, warm, specific, a number with a comma in it — and get one name deep before I see it for what it is: a family friend who gives to the syllableAstorand has never once given to me. Delete. Next draft. Delete. By the fourth I’ve stopped pretending. This isn’t fundraising. It’s laundering my own name through a children’s hospital.
I give myself ninety seconds with that, which is my maximum for sitting with anything, then do what I do: make a plan with no soft edges and decline to feel whatever’s underneath it. Fine. No name. I build something a name couldn’t buy, something strangers give to because I made them want to. At the top of a blank page I writeEARN ITand underline it twice, and hate that the header is in his words.
My mother calls while I’m glaring at the blank page, because her timing is a genius I’ve inherited as its exact inverse. I let it go to voicemail and listen standing up. Some conversations you don’t sit down for.
‘Charlotte. Darling. Bitsy Hartwell tells me you’ve involved yourself in some sort of charity competition.The word arrives with its own little pause, the one reserved for things one simply doesn’t do.I think it’s marvelous that you have hobbies. I’ve had Marguerite send something appropriate to the children’s fund under the family name, so that’s seen to, and you can put your energies back where they belong. The Whitney clerkship will not apply for itself.’
The money is handled, by the name, the way money is always handled — and the idea that I might want to build a thing myself, be a person instead of a syllable, doesn’t parse as a sentence a human could say.
I delete the voicemail. Then I call the children’s fund and very politely ask them to accept any gift arriving under the name Astor anonymously for the next two months, a sentence I’d wager no Astor has spoken in four generations, and it feels, absurdly, like the first dollar I’ve ever earned.
The other thing I catch that day, I catch by accident.
We’re in the team lounge, half-watching the men’s squad through the glass wall, the wall that faces thegoodcourts, the sunlit four o’clock ones I intend to repossess. And Indie goes quiet.
Not fully. Indie’s never fully quiet. She just drops out of Tess’s story mid-sentence, and her face does something I’ve never seen it do, a soft, helpless tilt toward the glass — and I follow it and find Cole Whitman on court two, laughing at something, openhearted and unremarkable and kind.
Oh, I think.Oh, no.
I know that look. I’ve spent a year watching its evil twin land on me from across a net. The difference, and it puts a cold hand on the back of my neck, is that Benedict wears his like a dare, and Indie wears hers like a wound she’s hiding from me specifically.
Cole Whitman: kind, loyal, laughs with his whole chest, and — my read is rarely wrong — every bit as gone as she is, and far too decent to gamble on being right about her. Two good people aching politely in two separate rooms. It offends me at a structural level. I could close that gap in a week with one hand behind my back, and the only thing on earth stopping me is sitting next to me, going pink.
She catches me catching her. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You did the face. Theotherone. The one where you’ve decided to help.” She grabs my wrist. “Charlotte. No.It’s nothing. Leave it.”
And I would have. That’s the part that matters later. Indie’snois the only no on this planet I honor without negotiation. I squeeze her hand and let her believe she’s won.
Then Coach Leon walks in with a clipboard and the expression of a man about to make my life worse on purpose.
“Astor. Good. Saves me finding you.”
“That sentence has never once ended well for me.”
“Founders’ Drive wants a marquee event. Donor night, two weeks out — mixed-doubles exhibition, men’s and women’s squads paired, ticket prices that should embarrass everyone who pays them. The department thinks it’ll print money.” He flips a page he doesn’t need to flip. “I’m pairing the headliners to sell it. Our two number ones. One team.”
The lounge goes very still, four people deciding at once not to laugh in front of me.
“No.”
“It’s not a question, Astor. You and Hawthorne. Top of both ladders, the rivalry’s good press, the boosters will eat it with a spoon.” He’s already leaving, the monster. “First practice tomorrow. Try not to kill him before the gala. We need the gate.”
The door swings shut. Somewhere to my left, Margo makes a small strangled sound, the start of a scream she has the sense to swallow.
Here is what Coach Leon, in his infinite clipboard wisdom, has failed to appreciate. I’m a singles player. By design, by temperament, by a bone-deep conviction that the only person I trust to cover a court is me. Doubles means handing half your territory to someone else and praying. It means a partner: their mistakes become yours, their rhythm becomes your problem, and you slap their hand at the net like you’re on the same side. For two weeks, in front of paying strangers, that partner is Benedict Prescott-Hawthorne.
I’ve spent my whole life making sure I’d never have to rely on anyone. Now I get to rely onhim.
“Two weeks,” Indie says carefully, in the voice you’d use on something with the pin pulled. “It’s only two weeks. And it’s for the kids.”
