Page 11 of The Reckless Rookie

“I’ve been thinking about the O’Sullivan placement.”

“I told you I wasn’t discussing it.”

“Hear me out. That’s all. Just hear me out.” He stops by the near paddock and turns to face me, and this is the pose, the one from the firm’s website, the one that’s supposed to make you feel handled in a good way. “You’ve got a national name in court-ordered placement on your property. Do you understand what that is? One controlled story, the right reporter, a photographer we approve, a piece about redemption and second chances and the work you do out here, and the program has a waiting list for the next ten years. Donors. Real ones. You stop scraping.”

And the worst part is he’d know how to do it, because he knows what this place runs on down to the dollar. He’s quoted my county contract at his own dinner parties like it’s a stock he’s thinking about shorting. That’s the one thing Sebastian reads better than anyone: not people, never people, but money, and mine most of all.

“I don’t scrape.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” That’s the problem. I always know exactly what he means. “You mean you’d like to turn a man’s worst week into content, and you’d like to use my program to do it, and you’ve decided that’s a favor to me.”

“I’d like to see what you’ve built get the recognition it deserves. The recognition you deserve.”

“It doesn’t need recognition. It needs to work. Those aren’t the same thing and that you’ve never understood the difference is…”

I stop.

Because I hear where the sentence is going, and I realize I’ve been walking toward it for longer than this conversation. For months. Maybe for the whole three years, the way you walk toward a gate you can see from across the field, slow, certain, in no particular hurry, right until you’re standing at it.

“… is the whole thing,” I finish, quieter. “That’s the whole thing, Sebastian.”

He knows the register change. He didn’t get where he is by missing register changes.

“What are we talking about right now?” he says carefully.

“We’re talking about the fact that you drove out here to sell my life’s work as a press release, and you genuinely thought I’d be grateful.” I’m not angry. What I’ll think about later is that I stood in front of the paddock and ended three years and my voice never left level.

“I’ve made harder calls than this before breakfast. This one took me longer than it should have.”

“Catalina.”

“It’s Catt.” And there it is, the thing I’ve been keeping in my boot for three years, out now, small and clean. “It was always Catt. I told you the first week. Three years, and not once. Not in front of your partners, not in bed, not once. And I kept a little count of it without deciding to, and I think the count is the reason I already knew.”

He does the thing where he recalculates. I watch him run it. The angles, the salvage, whether there’s a version of the next sentence that turns this around, and it’s almost impressive, the speed of it, and it’s exactly why I’m done.

“You’re ending this,” he says, “over a name.”

“No. I’m ending it over three years of you not hearing a small thing I asked for plainly. The name’s just how I kept score.”

He gets as far as the car before he decides he will not eat this quietly.

“You know what your problem is.” He says it over the roof of the German car, not a question; the polish gone now that there’s nothing left to sell. “You’ve spent so long out here in the dirt you’ve forgotten what you are. I was the best thing that was ever going to walk onto this ranch, Catalina. Men like me don’t come out to the county twice.” He opens the door. “You’ll be thirty-five and alone out here with your horses and your criminals, and you’ll remember I told you so.”

“Catt,” I say.

He’s already dropping into the seat.

“The name,” I say, louder, so it catches him before the door shuts.

“It’s Catt. You’re still getting it wrong on your way out.”

He reverses off the gravel he doesn’t like, careful even now, and I stand in the yard until the dust settles.

Then I stand there a while longer, because the thing nobody tells you about ending something you’re sure about is that being sure doesn’t make it light.

Three years. Not a bad man, exactly. Just a man who was never the man I needed him to be, and I knew it, and I stayed, and there’s a grief in the wasted time that has nothing to do with missing him. I don’t miss him. I miss the years I spent being almost-satisfied when I could have been alone, which is cleaner.