Page 198 of Gamebreaker

Cam's mother was helping me take my coat off. She was also hugging me, kissing both my cheeks, and steering me toward the stove, all at once, with the kind of coordination I'd only ever seen from her daughter running a fast break. She was shorter than me by like two inches, which I hadn't been prepared for. Somehow, I'd assumed everyone in this family came in Cam's size. Maria Russo was about five foot two, with silver hair pinned up in a claw clip, flour on her forearms, and the exact same amber eyes as her daughter.

She put both hands on my face.

Cam had told me, a month earlier, on my couch at seven in the morning, with the coffee going cold in the kitchen, in a voice I would be hearing for the rest of my life: my mother's going to hold your face in her hands and tell you she's been waiting for you my whole life.

I'd thought I was prepared.

I was not prepared.

"Look at you," Maria said. Her thumbs moved over my cheekbones exactly the way Cam's did, and my heart swelled with affection for her. "Look at this face. Cameron. Cameron, look at her face."

"I've seen her face, Ma," Cam said from behind me, dropping our bags by the door. "I see it every day."

"Don't get smart." Maria didn't look away from me. Her eyes had gone glassy. "Thirty-four years, I've been waiting for her to bring somebody home. Thirty-four years. And she brings me you." Her voice wobbled. "You're beautiful. You're so beautiful. Are you hungry? You look hungry."

"I ate on the plane."

"Plane food." She said it the way other people say tax fraud. "Sit. Sit down. I'm making you a plate."

"Dinner's not until six," Cam pointed out.

"So she'll have a plate now and a plate at six. Anthony, get her a chair."

Cam's father, a broad, gray-haired man with forearms like tree trunks and a fire department sweatshirt so old it had worn thin at the cuffs, pulled out a chair at the kitchen table for me and then stood there holding it, looking at me, and blinking a little too fast.

"Welcome to the family, sweetheart," he said gruffly. Then he turned around and started very aggressively rearranging the dish towels on the oven handle.

"Dad," Cam said.

"I'm fine."

"Are you crying?"

"I have allergies."

"It's October."

"October allergies. It's a real condition," Anthony said, still facing the oven. "Ragweed."

I sat down and looked at Cam over the top of the chair. She was standing in the doorway of her mother's kitchen with a duffel bag still over one shoulder, six foot three and Finals MVP and three championship rings on a chain around her neck, and she was looking at the three of us like she'd been handed a gift she'd stopped believing she could want.

I held out my hand.

She crossed the kitchen and took it.

And just like that, I was standing in her tattoo.

I'd better back up.

Two weeks earlier, the Fashion City Fangs won the WNBA Finals in six games.

I will not be taking questions about it, because I'm still not emotionally stable enough to discuss it without crying, but I will say that Game 6 was at home, and Cam hit two free throws with eleven seconds left to ice it, and before each one, she bounced the ball three times and glanced at the black hair tie on her wrist. And the broadcast zoomed in on it, and the announcers didn't know what it meant, and twenty-three thousand people in the arena didn't know what it meant, and I sat courtside in her jersey and knew exactly what it meant, and ugly-cried on national television.

There's a GIF. It has four million views. Mia sends it to me daily.

Then there was the parade.

I rode on the team float. Yes, me, Harper Amara DuBose, who once described professional basketball as throw ball good, rode down Fifth Avenue on the Fashion City Fangs championship float, in a RUSSO 4 jersey, waving at a crowd of thousands of people with my girlfriend's arm around my waist and Destiny spraying champagne at a news helicopter. I passed the coffee shop where the barista has been spelling my name wrong for six months, and he was outside on the sidewalk holding a sign that said GO FANGS, and also, I'm almost certain, HARPOR.