Page 108 of The Tiger in the Sack

She reached into her bag. “Oh and I brought the photo from the shoot, the one with April, the press never had it. Turns out an old photograph of two cheerleaders in a green room is worth something to me.” She slid it across the table without ceremony. “I take up space now. Somebody told me to once.”

I did not cry in a war room. I added it to the list of things I’d cry about later, which was getting to be a long and beautiful list.

“Sit down, Clover,” Gabi said. “We’ve got ten minutes before Monty gets here. He thinks he’s coming to a disciplinary meeting about you.”

“He’s not?”

Gabi smiled, and it was not a warm smile. It was the smile of a woman who worked her ass off to get to where she was and had confidently removed another obstacle from her path.

“He’s coming to his,” she said.

Monty Whyte walked in at ten exactly, because men like Monty are punctual to the meetings they think they’ve already won.

He had a leather folio and a tablet and he sat down without being asked, comfortable, the most comfortable person in the room the way he’d been the most comfortable person in every room for thirty years, never once having to wonder whether he belonged in it. He clocked the table. He clocked the numbers at it.

I watched him decide it was a show of force on Gabi’s part, a lot of women and a wide receiver assembled to make a point, and I watched him set it aside as a thing that would not matter in an hour, because the one trick Monty Whyte had never learned in his whole life was counting the people he’d decided didn’t count.

“Gabrielle,” he said. “Quite a crowd. I’d assumed this was a private personnel matter.” His eyes went around the table and landed on me, and softened into something worse than contempt, which was pity. “Ms. Freeman. I want you to know none of this is personal. You were put in an impossible position. A conflict of interest this size, the optics, the relationship with the quarterback⁠—”

“Sit down, Montgomery,” Gabi said.

He sat, because he thought sitting cost him nothing.

“You hired a public relations firm in June,” Gabi said. “Crestline Strategic. Retained quietly, paid through a discretionary line in football operations that routes around my desk. Do you want to tell the room what you hired them for, or should I?”

A flicker. Small. The first one.

“Crisis management,” Monty said smoothly. “Which, given the season start we’ve had, was prudent. The board will agree it was prudent.”

“They seeded the governance angle to four beat writers,” Jules said, not looking up from her devices, reading it off like a grocery list. “I have the email chain. The kid who interns there has a conscience and a roommate. The strategy doc went out August ninth. It has a timeline in it. You wrote a timeline, Mr. Whyte. You’re the only person in this scandal organized enough to leave a paper trail, and you used it on yourself.”

“I don’t know who that young woman is or what she thinks she⁠—”

“The pigs,” Zahra said.

The room went still in the way a room goes still when the real deal arrives.

“Excuse me?”

“The rubber pigs.” Zahra crossed to the glass wall and tapped the timeline. “Thrown at my squad on debut day. Branded novelty pigs, a full case, delivered to the loading dock the morning of the game. Signed for.” She set a printout on the table in front of him, slowly, the way she sets a correction in front of a dancer who already knows the count was wrong. “Dock receipt. Vendor invoice. The vendor’s a shell. The shell traces to a second shell. The second shell bills against the football operations budget. Your budget, Monty. You didn’t just spin the insult after it happened. You catered it.”

“You ordered the pigs,” I said.

I hadn’t planned to say it. It came up out of me, out of the place under the list, and it came out quiet, which is how I sound when I mean it most.

“You looked at thirty-one women I built a squad out of, women this league spent years telling to sit down, and you spent franchise money to have rubber pigs thrown at them on the one day they got to stand up. And then you called it organic doubt from the fans. You called us the distraction. You wrote a timeline about how to make a room full of grandmothers and dancers look like a scandal, and you expensed the pigs to do it, because it never once occurred to you that the loading dock has a camera or that the woman whose mom works event staff would take a picture or that any of us were people who could see you.”

Monty’s mouth was a flat line now. The ease was gone. What replaced it was the thing I’d been waiting a whole season to watch arrive on his face, the dawning, the realization landing on him in real time that he had been visible the entire time to exactly the people he’d never bothered to look at.

“This is circumstantial,” he said. “Shells. An intern. A photograph of a loading dock. You don’t have⁠—”

“The café,” Fox said.

Everyone looked at him. Fox Daws straightened his movie star suit.

“There’s a café on the corner by the practice facility,” Fox said. “Pour Decisions. The owner’s named Dave. Great guy, terrible at naming things, worse than me, and I named a penthouse the Broasis. Dave notices who pays, because that’s his whole job, and he watched a man in a team lanyard buy coffee three separate times for a woman in pink leather, and one of them always put it on a corporate card, and Dave kept the receipts because he’s a small business owner in this economy and he does not play about a chargeback.”

Fox slid his phone across. “That’s you, Monty. And that’s Tiki Jackson. Three meetings. Two weeks. Corporate card. You want to tell the room you were discussing the weather, or should we let Tiki tell it, since she just walked in?”