Page 69 of The Tiger in the Sack

She came down the tunnel steps in heels not built for stadium concrete, a headset connected to nothing, dog purse on her shoulder, three small heads tracking the action, and arrived at the table with the proprietary stride of a woman surveying a renovation she was paying for.

“There’s my baby,” she said, and for one horrifying suspended second I thought she meant Isak, before she gestured, expansively, at the entire end zone. The floor. The cameras. The four thousand people. The squad. “Look at her. Look what we’re building.”

We.

The word went into me like a splinter. Not because it was loud. Because it was an owner’s word, and I was an employee, and that was not a scale in my favor and we both knew it.

“Tiki,” Gabrielle said, in the warning register.

“I’ve been saying for ages the squad needed a vision.” To me now. To the table. To the cameras she’d located by instinct. “A point of view. And I think with my eye and Clover’s…whatever Clover does.”

“Directing,” I said. “I direct and coordinate it all.”

“We could really make this sing. I’m thinking of a whole rebrand. Lose the orange, it’s so aggressive.”

And here was the disaster, the actual one, dressed up in pink leather and standing too close to my cameras. I could not win this contest the normal way.

Tiki Jackson owned a piece of the building we were standing in. I could correct her on the word directing once, lightly, with a smile, and I had. But I could not tell an owner to take her eye and her rebrand and her flying-monkey Chihuahuas back up the tunnel, not in front of four thousand people and three cameras, not without it becoming the story instead of Maya, instead of Deja, instead of the girl in a shirt branded with my personal hero and… friend’s mother.

She had me. She didn’t even know she had me. She thought she was helping.

As Tiki moved closer, Isak relocated.

I don’t have a more accurate verb. One moment he was at my left, the next he’d performed some piece of footwork that put me physically between himself and Tiki, his hand landing light at the small of my back like punctuation.

Tiki’s gaze dropped to the hand and climbed back up and recalculated, and the headset she wasn’t using became a thing she suddenly had to adjust, and for the first time all day Tiki Jackson was on the back foot.

I told myself I let it work because it got her off the rebrand. I told myself a number of things.

Tiki marched off toward her sister, and Isak blew out a relieved breath.

I didn’t get to address that we were once again doing the thing he’d instantly said yes to in my office the other day because someone in the crowd was cackling, and not in the joyful way.

I’d half-clocked them earlier and filed them under every event has a few, a knot of maybe five men not cheering for anybody, who’d come to a free public event specifically to not enjoy it, the way some men will.

Into a lull, one stood and cupped his hands. “You’re taking the whole Cincinnati flying pigs thing too far, Tigers!”

It carried. Stadiums are built to carry. A pocket around him did the ugly thing, the laugh that isn’t about funny, the laugh that’s about permission, and I watched it travel maybe four rows before it ran out of fuel and died, because the other three thousand nine hundred and ninety people did not think it was funny.

But the four rows had laughed.

Heat climbed my neck. Not embarrassment. The other thing. The thing that’s followed me since the seventh-grade dance, dressed up as concern, dressed up as a joke, dressed up as just being honest. Beside me Isak had gone a different kind of still, the kind that builds toward an explosion.

I put two fingers on his forearm without looking at him. “Don’t. That’s what it’s for. Don’t give it the day.”

His jaw worked. He didn’t move. Score one for me.

Gabrielle was already on her phone, already half-risen, and within ninety seconds two stadium security officers made their polite, enormous way up the steps, and the five men were escorted out with a minimum of drama and a maximum of announcing their rights to anyone who’d listen, which was no one. Clean. Fast. The institution closing ranks around the women, easy as anything, because right now it was five guys and a free Tuesday.

And down the table, Monty stood, capped his pen, and tucked the clipboard under his arm.

“Shame about that. But you saw it.” He nodded up at the emptying rows like exhibit A, voice pitched just for our end of the table, a man being so very reasonable. “Not everyone’s on board for whatever this is. Something to be honest about, going forward. For the brand.”

Then he left. Walked up the tunnel the same direction security had taken the men, like the part of the day he’d come for was over and there was no reason to stay for the part where everyone was happy.

I didn’t have a free brain cell to deal with what that meant.

When I sat back down, rattled and working hard to keep it off my face, I turned to Venus. “What is it with the pigs? Is that a Cincinnati thing, or me thing?”