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My throat goes tight. I don’t say anything because anything I say will be wrong, will be too much, will make him regret opening the drawer. So I just put my hand on his chest, over his heart, and I let him feel me there.

“I don’t know how it went,” he says. “Whether he saw what he came for, whether it’s enough. I played the best I’ve got, and I don’t know, but there’s nothing left to do about it.” The muscle in his jaw moves. “That’s the worst part. Standing in a gap’s the one thing I know how to do. And there’s no gap to stand in for this one.”

“No,” I say. “There isn’t.” I don’t pretty it up, because he’d hate that. “So you just have to live in the not-knowing, which is genuinely the worst possible thing for a person who controls everything.”

“Yeah.” A breath. “Sound familiar?”

“Intimately.”

We’re quiet for a moment, the two of us in the dark, two control-freaks who’ve spent three weeks very badly pretending they can manage the unmanageable.

“Margo.” His voice goes careful. “If it goes the way I need it to — the draft, Boston — I want you to know it’s not just about the game. There’s a financial piece I haven’t—” He stops. Starts again, the sentence shaped differently. “Let’s just say there’s a debt I need to clear, and the draft is the only thing that clears it. So it’s not one thing. It’s about four things at once, and they’re all wearing the same jersey.”

I hear the shape of it — the money, the father, the string he’s on — and I don’t push. The Charleston drive is where that opens, I can feel it, the same way I know the shape of a conversation that wants to happen somewhere else. So I take the piece he’s handed me and I hold it carefully.

“Okay,” I say. “I hear you.”

He exhales. Like he thought I’d make it a bigger thing, and the fact that I didn’t is its own relief.

“Your turn,” he says.

“My turn for what?”

“Something true. That’s how this works now, apparently.”

I think about deflecting. It’s automatic, the bright answer loading, the light pivot to a joke. And then I think about how he just handed me the inside of a drawer he keeps shut for everyone, and I think about that being one-sided, and I don’t like how it sits.

“Nationals is in April,” I say. “And I know that’s not what people think when they think about me. Pre-law Margo, Charleston Margo, the one with the color-coded board and the five-year plan. But Nationals is —” I stop. Try again. “Up there, at the top of a basket toss, half a second of weightlessness — it’s the only time in my entire life I’m not managing anything. Not a single variable. I can’t. You can’t manage gravity.” I feel him listening, the particular stillness of him when he’s paying real attention. “And there’s a version of me that only exists up there, and I don’t know who she is in daily life, I just know she’s the one I trust most. And every year at Nationals, I get to find out if she’s still there.”

The silence after that is a different kind. The good kind. The kind that means something got said.

“She is,” he says. Low. Certain, like he’s handing it back to me.

“You’ve never even seen me stunt.”

“I’ve seen you.” His hand moves, slow, through my hair. “Enough.”

And that undoes me more than any of it. Not the game, not the hotel, not the three weeks of a thing we’re not naming — just that. I’ve seen you. Enough. Said like a fact. The way he says everything true.

I press my face into his chest and stay there. I don’t think about the morning. I don’t think about six-week arrangements or sixth terms or all the ways this should have stayed simple. I let the night be what it is for a little while longer.

And then my phone lights up on the nightstand.

I should ignore it. It’s two-forty in the morning, I’m in Burlington, Vermont, wrapped around a person I’m not supposed to be wrapped around — nothing good comes from a phone at two-forty. But the screen shows the preview, and I see the name before I can look away.

Mom.

Not a call. A text. Which means she’s not waiting up in a panic — she sent it earlier and I missed it. I reach over and read it, because not reading it is a different kind of anxiety.

Margo, sugar. Your father and I were hoping you might come home next weekend. Your sister will be here — she has some news she’d like to share with the family in person, and it would mean so much to us all to have you there too. Let me know, love.

I stare at it for a second. Then I put the phone face-down.

Maddison has news. The kind you share in person with the whole family assembled. The kind that makes my mother text at eleven at night with that particular warmth she uses when she’s asking me to do something she knows I don’t want to do but will anyway, because I’m the easy one, because I don’t make things into productions.

I know what kind of news it is. Something in me just knows, the way you know weather from the pressure — the specific weight of Caroline Ashby’s careful wording, your sister will be here, not Maddison’s coming, like the distinction creates a buffer between me and the thing I’m about to be asked to smile through.

“Hey.” Theo’s voice, quiet. He felt the shift. Of course he did. “What is it?”