Page 154 of Gamebreaker

To the fans who this changes things for: I understand. Thank you for the support you've given me.

To the fans who this doesn't change things for: Thank you for loving the game as much as I do.

To the person who taught me that living honestly is worth everything: You were right. I'm sorry it took me so long to be brave enough. I love you.

Cam

I read it three times.

I saved it as a draft.

Monday. That was the plan. I didn't have to do anything tonight.

I went to bed and didn't sleep.

Friday. Three days before Monday.

I was at my kitchen table, watching film. Not Seattle. Us. Our semifinal clincher from last Wednesday, because I'd needed to watch a game I already knew the ending to.

I watched myself run a pick-and-roll in the second quarter. I watched the pass leave my hands on the exact path I'd meant it to take and land in a window that hadn't existed half a second earlier. Twenty thousand people on the road had groaned when it went in.

I couldn't remember feeling a single second of it.

I paused the frame and sat back. Cameron Russo at the top of her craft. Twelve years of discipline and sacrifice and chosen loneliness, distilled into one pass that was, by any measure, excellent.

It meant nothing with no one to share it with.

Not the team. I had the team. I'd always had the team. But the other part. The life outside the lines. This house and the midnight runs and the sauce I made when the stress got too heavy. The woman who'd sat across from me in a dim booth and made me laugh until my ribs hurt. Who'd learned to shoot free throws in front of a crowd of smart-mouthed kids. Who'd known exactly who I was under the performance without ever being told.

I wanted to post about her. Not the post in my drafts. Ordinary posts. Her coffee order. Her shoes, always too fashionable for the occasion. The way she looked when she thought no one was watching and let her expression become honest, become real. I wanted to look up from the court and know she was in that seat because she was mine and I was hers, out loud, in every way that was real.

None of that was possible while I was hiding.

None of it had ever been possible while I was hiding.

I closed the laptop.

The house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator. One light on in the kitchen. The rest of it dark glass.

I opened my phone and reinstalled Instagram.

I opened the draft and read the last line.

To the person who taught me that living honestly is worth everything: You were right. I'm sorry it took me so long to be brave enough. I love you.

Monday felt very far away.

Harper had been on a date a week ago. Harper had stood in my doorway three weeks ago and told me to eat real meals. Every day I waited was another day she spent learning how to stop waiting for me. And I'd made her wait twelve years' worth already, even if she'd only been in my life for a few weeks of it.

My thumb hovered over Share.

My hand was shaking. Not a little. Enough that I had to set the phone on the table and press my palm flat beside it to steady myself. I could hear my own breathing. I could feel the old fear rise up through my chest the way it always had, steady and familiar as my own pulse, running the same warning it had been running since I was twenty-two.

You could lose everything.

I looked at the hair tie on my wrist, sitting over the coordinates of my mother's kitchen.

Underneath the fear, for the first time, another voice was louder.