Page 102 of The Tiger in the Sack

“Isak.”

“—I’m not going to, because you’d hate that, you’d hate being a reason somebody quit a thing, you’re not a reason somebody quits, you’re a reason somebody plays better, but I’m just establishing that the option exists, in my heart, as a⁠—”

“Isak.” She’d come all the way in now. The door swung shut behind her. She put her keys down on the console table by the helmets, set them down like she lived here, and that almost finished me. “I drove here to say something and you’re doing the thing where you say all the words so I don’t have to find mine.”

“I absolutely do that.”

“Let me find mine.”

So I shut up, which is a personal record.

She looked at me for a second. Read me the way she reads everything, except I watched the reading change halfway through, I watched her decide not to find the edges of me, decide it on purpose, and that was a thing I’d never seen her do before and I would’ve laid down on the floor about it if she’d asked.

“I’ve spent my whole life being brave about not getting things,” Clover said. “I’m really good at it. I could teach it. And you’re the first person who ever made me want to find out if I’m brave enough to actually get the thing.” Her voice did something in the middle, cracked and kept going, the way she talks when the real one comes out and steps on the careful one. “And I’m terrified. I want you to know I picked this scared. I didn’t stop being scared. I just decided I’d rather be scared with you than safe without you, and if that’s not the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to you I don’t want to hear about whoever beat it.”

“Nobody beat it.”

“Good.”

And here’s where the wine plan had a job to do, and the wine plan was on the floor with the other dominoes, because I had her here saying the bravest thing I’d ever heard out of the mouth of the bravest person I knew, choosing me on purpose with both eyes open, and there was still a thing she didn’t know, and my father’s voice was in the back of my skull like a hand on the back of my neck — before this gets solved, not after, a man who admits the secret after he’s the hero is just a man who got caught at a better moment — and I have never been able to hold a true thing in my mouth once it decides it’s leaving.

“I own the building,” I said.

It came out the way everything important comes out of me. Sideways. At the worst possible second. Standing in the entryway while the woman I loved had just told me she’d rather be scared with me.

Clover blinked. “What?”

“This building. The Rhinehaus. I own it. Not just the penthouse, Chris bought me the penthouse. I mean the whole thing, all twelve units. I bought the other eleven under an LLC three years ago and renovated the building and the management company you pay rent to is mine. It’s me, I’m your landlord. I’ve been your landlord since before I knew you, you’ve been paying me, I didn’t know it was you, and then I knew it was you, and I should have told you the night of the dinner when you asked if I lived in a brewery, and I didn’t, and that’s the worst one, the not-telling-you-at-dinner, the rest of it I can explain, the dinner one I just⁠—”

“You’re my landlord.”

“I’m your landlord.”

“I have filed three maintenance requests.”

“The dishwasher, the buzzer, and the thing with the window in the second bedroom.” I knew them. Of course I knew them. I’d read every one of them at one in the morning and routed them to a real repair guy through a real company and felt like a stalker and a coward in equal measure. “I read all of them. I had them fixed. I never once let it be me who showed up, because I was a coward about it, the way I’m a coward about everything that matters, quietly and from a distance and with excellent customer service.”

She was staring at me. I could not read it. For the first time in weeks I could not read Clover Freeman’s face and I had nothing left to throw, no wine, no plan, no bit, no cat to point at, just me standing in my own foyer having confessed to being a landlord like it was a crime, which in my heart it sort of was.

“There’s more,” I said, because apparently I’d decided to die. “I’m independently wealthy, outside of football money. I own a gaming company, it’s real, it’s a lot, and I built all of it where nobody could see because—” and this is the part I had not planned to say, the part that came up from under all the other parts, “—because I was three when my mom died and I don’t remember her and everybody else in my family got to and somewhere in there I decided the only stuff that’s safe to love is the stuff nobody else can see to take away from you. So I made everything invisible. The building. The motorcycle. The money. And then I met you and you were the first thing I ever wanted to make loud.”

The apartment was very quiet. My family had headed off to their hotel hours ago.

Too quiet, actually, for an apartment that I now realized, with a slow cold horror unspooling up the back of my neck, was not empty.

“Hi,” said Jules, from the couch.

I turned around.

My sister and my best friend were sitting on my sofa. They were wearing matching white sheet masks, the Korean ones Fox ordered by the case, the kind that make a person look like a ghost filing an insurance claim.

They had a bowl of popcorn between them. Neither of them had moved. Neither of them, I understood now, had moved in some time, because they had walked in on the single most naked conversation of my entire life approximately four sentences after it started and had made the executive decision, as a unit, to hold extremely still and witness all of it like the season finale of something with subtitles.

Or rather I had walked that conversation in on them. They were clearly already here.

Fox raised one hand in a small, solemn wave. The mask did not allow for more expression than that. It didn’t need to.

“How long,” I said.