Page 110 of Power Play

Kasperi: video attached. 0:41. watch with sound

Kasperi: she said fire inside!!

Cole: I need everyone to know I was fine

Griffin: you were not fine

Cole: I was extremely fine

Ryan: Maren has watched it six times

Kasperi: best player at that performance. #1 draft pick. generational talent

Theo: Elle était parfaite.

She was perfect, he’d written. Even I could manage that much French.

Cole: I don’t know what that says but I agree

Cole: someone translate

Theo: No.

Kasperi: who made the wings

Cole: yeah who made the wings

Cole: those were not store wings

Cole: those were love wings

Eli, driving, glanced at the phone where it sat in the cupholder lighting up, then reached over without taking his eyes off the road and turned it face down on the console, and said nothing, and I turned to my window and the parking lot so he wouldn’t see what my face was doing. In the back, Iris, still in the wings because she had refused the de-dragoning, was telling Gerald that the secret word had been fire all along, and that nobody had guessed, so she had won.

Then the phone, face down, buzzed twice more, muffled. At the next red light he turned it over, read the screen, and tapped it once with his thumb, without a word.

Cole: love wings

Cole: [Eli left the chat]

Cole: [Cole added Eli to the chat]

Iris had gone to bed in the wings, which I’d allowed, because I picked my battles and this wasn’t one, and I’d clipped the tail to the end of her bed so it wouldn’t crumple, and she’d made me and her father each hold one of Gerald’s front legs and swear we’d seen the roar, both of us, in detail, before she’d consent to close her eyes. We had sworn. We’d described the roar down to the felt. She’d accepted our testimony and dropped off almost at once with her thumb an inch from her mouth and a dragon tail hanging off the footboard.

Then it was the two of us in a dark house, and all day I’d been carrying more than I had anywhere to set down.

I had made those wings. I had sat in an eleven-inch chair in a scarf in December while a row of other mothers worked out what I was to the men on either side of me, and I had organized my face through every second of it, because the one sentence I couldn’t stand up and say in that gym was the true one, which was that the dragon was mine. She wasn’t mine by law, or by any paper a person had signed. She was mine the way four in the morning was mine, the hours nobody else wanted, the work that only ever showed up finished.

He was at the sink rinsing the last glass. I came up behind him and put my forehead between his shoulder blades and both hands flat on his stomach and stayed there, and I didn’t explain myself, which for me was a miracle on the order of loaves and fishes.

He turned the water off. He didn’t turn around.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk.”

It was the truth, and back in Boston it would have been a foreign language in my mouth. There I’d talked straight through all of it. I booked it and narrated it and checked in and managed it, six years of being useful with the lights off, and I’d decided the flatness was simply how it went for everybody and no one had bothered to warn me. I’d been wrong, and there was no refund on it.

He turned around inside my arms and got a hand under my jaw and tipped my face up, and he took what he read there seriously, because his thumb went once along my cheek and his eyes changed.