Page 58 of The Reckless Rookie

“Tell me what you need from me.”

The question catches where the one in the barn caught, except this time I answer. “Authorization to speak with Marcus, and every record he can share. I’ll handle the county contract. You handle your case. We share what connects them, and neither of us decides for the other.”

A beat of silence. “Yeah, Catt. That’s how this should have gone.”

Marcus joins the call. My father asks about the injured man’s civil claim, the chain of custody, and which firm had access to the original recording. Sebastian’s firm sits in the answer to every question.

The hospital bill and the man whose life changed under Finn’s hands didn’t vanish when the criminal case moved into intervention. Marcus expects a settlement even if the full tape changes the leverage. Finn has already told him the last hit remains his.

Marcus is careful about what the footage can do. It may restore the beginning. It cannot erase the final hit. “I know,” Finn says. “I’m not asking it to.”

I never asked. I called the not-asking strength.

It was never strength. Everyone who loves me has been saying the same thing, and I couldn’t hear it because I built my whole self out of being the one who sees everything first.

I’m not doing this to get him back. I don’t get to think that far. I cut him clean and cruel on purpose, called him a good worker to his face, and a man doesn’t come back through the dark toward a woman who did that to him. I wouldn’t ask him to. This isn’t a door I’m opening for Finn.

It’s a door I’m opening for me. To stop being the hollow thing that cuts the real one loose to keep the paperwork clean. To fight for what’s mine the honest way, whether or not there’s anybody left standing at the end of it to fight beside.

But God help me, watching my father write something on the back of an envelope in the block letters he’s used my whole life. If it works. If they take Sebastian’s weapon out of his hand and turn it around, and the ranch is still standing when the dust comes down.

Then maybe I have earned the one trip I want: to stand in front of a man I wronged and hand him the truth I was too much a coward to give him the first time.

Not to be forgiven. Just to quit lying.

By noon the next day, Finn and Marcus are forcing production through the civil case while my father, county counsel, and I prepare the contract response. Ramón is informed through counsel and recuses from any new order involving Finn. For the first time, nobody is carrying the entire fight alone.

It doesn’t come down the second you let somebody else take a corner.

That’s just one more place I was wrong, all those years I stood under it alone, calling the weight of it mine.

Chapter thirty-three

Finn

Win tonight and we’re going to the Conference Final.

That’s the sentence sitting on the whole building. Game six, up three games to two, and if we take this one the San Antonio Stampede reach the Conference Final for the first time in the short loud life of the franchise. Nobody expected us here. We’re the expansion club still figuring out its own logo, the seed nobody wanted, and we clawed in on the last weekend of the year and then refused to go home two rounds running, and now we’re one win from the Conference Final, at home, in front of eighteen thousand people who spent the winter deciding I was a criminal and the playoffs deciding I was theirs.

Both correct. People hold a lot of truths at once.

The other guys are the ones facing the end tonight, and a team playing to stay alive is the most dangerous animal in the sport. Lose and their summer starts. So they come out with nothing left to protect and one job between them, which is to drag this game somewhere skill doesn’t decide it, and the fastest road there is me.

I’m the story. Been the story since a pole camera caught ten seconds of me in a parking lot, and a team one loss from the golf course will use any story it can get its hands on, and mine’s the best one going. The enforcer with the record. The guy on a court order. The powder keg they already watched go off once, on a loop. You don’t have to be clever to game-plan me. You light the fuse and wait.

So they light it.

“Court let you out for this, forty-four?” he asks at the dot. “How many strikes before they put you back?”

The oldest bait there is. Near enough the exact sentence a drunk handed me by a lifted truck on the worst night of my life, the one I turned around for.

Ryan wins it back to me and I move it up the wall clean, first pass on the tape, and go.

That’s the answer. Not the one my hands ask for. The one that works.

They spend a period learning I won’t bite, then get serious because they have a season to save. Fifty-two runs the knee everybody remembers from that first night. It’s healthy now, but it’s still the spot every team circles. The leg lights up. I get up without pretending it didn’t hurt, skate it off, and stay in the play. They cross-check Colt late behind the net; he checks my face on the way back to the bench, and I tap his pads. I have it. Not with my fists.

I put one behind their goalie instead.