Page 129 of Gamebreaker

I'd said it out loud. I'd named it. And naming it hadn't made it easier to carry. It had made it heavier, a weight I couldn't file away under discipline and forward momentum. I couldn't train through it. I couldn't fix it with film study or free throws or any of the ten thousand mechanisms I'd built over twelve years to manage the inconvenient fact of having feelings.

Harper had been gone for four hours.

It felt like a season.

Coach had given us the day off before tomorrow's flight for Game 2. I lasted until two in the afternoon before I went down to the home gym, because I needed to put my body to work before my body turned on me.

I changed into practice clothes on autopilot and ran through an hour of conditioning I didn't register. Then I walked out to the backyard hoop in the flat, gray afternoon light and started shooting free throws.

Bounce once. Twice. Three times.

Three taps. Like your free throws.

I stood very still at the line with the ball in my hands.

Then I shot. Elbow in. Follow through. Watch the arc.

Swish.

I retrieved it. Lined up again. Bounce, bounce, bounce. Swish. Again. Swish. Again.

My form was perfect. My mechanics were intact. Twelve years of muscle memory meant my body knew how to do this even when the rest of me had come apart. Bend, extend, release. The ball knew where to go. The ball always knew where to go.

That was more than I could say for myself.

I hit forty-seven in a row without missing, and I barely noticed any of them. My mind kept drifting back to Harper in my bedroom doorway, already dressed, her eyes wet with tears she was refusing to let fall. The tender, ruinous gentleness of her voice when she'd said it just makes us wrong for each other right now. Like she was trying to protect me from the truth. Like she didn't want it to hurt me more than it had to.

She'd been trying to be kind.

Even then. Even leaving. Even after I'd asked her to be my secret.

Even at the door, when she'd told me not to walk her out. When she'd made sure that no neighbor and no stranger with a camera would see Cameron Russo standing on her front step in sweats, watching a crying woman in a Fangs jersey get into a car.

She'd protected me on her way out.

I missed the next shot.

I recovered. Shot again. Missed again. And again. And again. And again.

Five in a row, which hadn't happened since I was nineteen, running on forty-eight hours without sleep before a conference tournament. I stood at the line and stared at the ball in my hands, the familiar weight, the pebbled grain worn smooth under my fingers, and I tried to remember why this had ever felt like enough.

I threw it. Too hard, with no arc at all, and it slammed off the backboard at the wrong angle and sailed over the fence into my neighbor's yard. I heard it land somewhere in the hedges with a dull thud that I felt in my gut.

I stood there in the gray light for a long time, looking at the fence where it had gone.

I didn't go get it.

I went inside before I broke more.

The kitchen was spotless. I'd cleaned it this morning, in those blank hours between Harper leaving and Trish calling, because I needed my hands busy and cleaning made me feel in control. Every surface gleamed. The espresso machine sat in its corner, polished and ready.

I made a shot. Set it down. Watched the steam curl off the surface.

I didn't drink it.

My phone was face-up on the island. The text exchange with Harper sat open on the screen, and I kept reading it the way you press a bruise. Not because it feels good. Because you need to know the damage is still there. That you didn't imagine how bad it was.

Harper