Page 120 of Final Drive

“I didn’t ask.”

“You were about to.”

“I was about to ask if you wanted my headphones.” He holds them up. “But sure. Let’s do it your way.”

I take them. He doesn’t say anything else for two hours. I fall asleep somewhere past the state line and wake up with my head on the window and his jacket over me. I don’t remember him putting it there.

The venue is a man-made course cut through flat farmland. Six lanes, a grandstand on the west bank, and parking for a small city. We get there at one. The hotel is fifteen minutes away, and the lobby is full of enormous people in matching sweatpants.

Bennett hands out keys. Bo with Jackson, Tyler with Eli, Beckett with Cameron, Zane with Gray, and a single for me on a different floor. It isn’t subtle. Nobody comments.

We have course access at five. I’ve got three hours and nothing to do with them.

That lasts until my phone rings at 1:35.

The screen says C. CARMINE, and I know before I answer it.

“Ms. Callahan. Are you somewhere you can talk?”

I sit down on the end of the bed. “Go ahead.”

“The compliance office received a formal challenge to your eligibility at eleven this morning. It came through the conference rather than through us, which means I found out about it forty minutes ago, the same as everyone else.” She’s talking fast, which she doesn’t do. “It cites your amended registration and the article. It asks the regatta committee to review whether Sable Ridge certified an ineligible athlete.”

“Harrison.”

“It’s filed by an attorney on behalf of an anonymous complainant, and I’m not going to speculate on the record.”

“And off it?”

“Off it, there are maybe three people in this state with the standing and the temperament, and two of them have no reason to care.” She lets that sit for a second. “Here’s the part you need to hear. The committee doesn’t want to adjudicate a designation dispute the day before heats. They want it gone. The fastest way to make it gone is to scratch the entry the complaint attaches to and let everyone go rowing.”

“Scratch me.”

“Scratch the bonded pair.”

I stop breathing for a second.

“Run that by me again.”

“You and Mr. Lockwood are the two names on the registration packet that touch this complaint. You’re the coxswain whose status is challenged and he’s the bonded partner named in the article. The cleanest thing available to the committee is to pull both of you and certify the rest of the boat with substitutes.” Her voice doesn’t change. “I want to be clear that I think it’s cowardly and I’ve said so to three people this morning. It’s also what they’ll do by tonight if nothing changes.”

“They’d scratch the stroke seat the night before heats.”

“They’d scratch anybody, at any hour, if it made a problem go away.”

I put my free hand flat on the bedspread.

“What changes it?”

“Somebody with standing tells the committee an adult falsified the registration of a minor, and that the minor isn’t the one who filed it.” Carmine takes a breath. “Which is what your article says. But an article isn’t a statement. They need it sworn, from the person who did it, in front of a committee, today.”

“My father will never do that.”

“Then get me somebody who will.”

“There isn’t anybody else. He’s the only person alive who signed that form.”

“I’m aware.” She goes quiet for a second. “Ms. Callahan, I’m going to do something now that will get me a conversation with my director if it comes out. There’s a hearing room at the hotel and a committee that convenes at four. Whoever walks in before they vote is the whole game. Afterward it stops being about facts.”