Page 434
“You barely know me.”
“I know enough. You make him more alive, you threaten people creatively, and you understand that I am the superior athlete despite what his contract suggests.”
“You’re a goalie. Your job is to stand there while people shoot things at you.”
“You have deeply wounded me.”
“You’ll recover.”
He points toward me. “See? Friendship.”
My smile refuses to remain contained.
“I’m not asking you to abandon what you built,” he continues. “Encanto matters. Your loft matters. The woman you became in Michigan matters. I’m showing you that Milwaukee isn’t the place where Ryan came to suffer after you. It’s where he built a life after surviving.”
“I know.”
“No, you know it intellectually. You saw pictures and read his letters. I want you to see that he has people here. He has a team that respects him, neighbors who know him, a bookstore that saves dead-poet shit behind the counter, and a corner acquaintance who measures his emotional stability through how mean he is.”
“That last one really completes the image.”
“It’s a diverse support system.”
He looks around the apartment before returning his attention to me.
“There is room for your life here,” Briggs says. “That doesn’t mean you have to move tomorrow or close your shop. It means Ryan didn’t create something that requires you to become smaller before you can fit inside it.”
Emotion presses against the back of my throat.
“You really want me here,” I say.
“I’ve been handling him alone for two years. I need reinforcements.”
The joke softens the moment without erasing it.
I reach across the island and steal one of his fries.
Briggs slaps my hand too late. “That was mine.”
“You ate Ryan’s chips.”
“Those were communal.”
“They were unopened.”
“Communal packaging.”
His phone lights beside him.
TEMPLE appears again.
I look at the screen and then slowly at him.
“Eat your stolen fry,” he warns.
“Would Temple enjoy Milwaukee?”
“Charm.”
