Page 139 of Final Drive

“I don’t.”

“You absolutely do,” Beckett says. “You get all flat and terrifying and say something that makes us want to die for you.”

“That’s concerning on several levels.”

“But you admit there’s a thing.”

“No.”

Zane points his water bottle at me. “Do the thing.”

I sit in the stern with eight men in front of me and the west wind moving across the course. I have no idea how many minutes of my career are left, only that I can count them now.

I press the button on the cox box.

“Two things. First one’s technical. The gusts are coming every forty seconds through the middle, and the lump is going to make you want to grab it. Don’t. Long and patient through the rough, and I’ll tell you when.”

Nobody moves.

I look at Gray, then past him down the boat, all the way to Cameron in the bow.

“Second thing. I’ve coxed forty-one races. Every one of them, some part of me was managing something else. My designation. Suppressants. My parents. An investigation. A reporter. A man with a credential.” My voice tries to move on me, but I get it back where it belongs. “There is nothing left to manage. It’s all out. Everything anybody could use against me is public, and I’m still sitting here.”

Bo makes a low sound somewhere in the middle of the boat.

“This is the first race of my life where the only thing in front of me is two thousand meters of water. So I’m going to enjoy it, and you’re going to give me the best twenty-four strokes of your lives at the start. Then you’re going to be patient for a thousand meters, and then we’re going to take it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Zane says.

A few of them laugh.

Good. That’s enough.

The starter calls us into position. I make the last adjustment, settle my hands, and watch the flag.

“Attention.”

The boat goes still.

I’ve been asked a hundred times what a coxswain actually does. Nobody ever likes my answer, since on a good day I do almost nothing. I put a boat in a place and then I take my hands off it.

The horn blasts.

“Row.”

They give me the twenty-four.

I’ve never had a start like it, and I never will again. Eight men who have spent nine days being investigated, photographed, grabbed, disowned, and put on a wire service pour every ounce of it into the first twenty-four strokes of a national final. We come off the blocks a length up on the field in twenty seconds.

“Lengthen. Settle in two. One. Two.”

Thirty-three. One beat lower than the semi, exactly where I put it, and the boat runs out flat and long underneath me.

“That’s it. That’s the boat. Nobody touch anything.”

At five hundred, we’re half a length up on lane five and a seat on Northridge. The crew that’s been favored all season is sitting in my peripheral vision waiting for us to make a mistake.

At seven hundred, the first gust comes across.