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“I know you are.” He gave me a look that contained more information than the sentence that followed it. “Just making sure we’re all on the same page.”

He peeled off toward the administrative offices. I walked to my truck. The San Antonio heat wrapped around me the second I stepped outside, heavy and close, and I stood in the parking lot longer than necessary, keys in my hand, staring at nothing.

Somewhere inside the building, Samantha Cole was making plans for dinner with my teammates. Laughing at Brick’s jokes. Reading rooms with that photographer’s precision that saw everything and gave nothing away.

And I was standing in a parking lot, performing the familiar calculus of self-preservation: how much distance was too much, how long I could keep the walls at full height before the weight of them started cracking the foundation.

My phone buzzed. A text from my sister.

Lena: Tommy wants to know when you’re coming over. Ranger ate a shoe. It was yours. Sorry, not sorry.

Me: Soon.

Lena: That’s what you said last week. I’m starting to think you don’t love us anymore.

Me: I’ll bring coffee.

Lena: Forgiven.

I pocketed the phone and got in the truck. The engine turned over. The world narrowed back down to the things I could control: training schedule, contract negotiations, the next decade of my life.

I pulled out of the lot and did not look back at the building.

But I could still hear her laugh. Warm, carrying across a gymnasium like it had been designed to find the one person who was not ready to hear it.

Chapter seven

Samantha

Media day was my Olympics.

Not in scale. Not even close. But in the high-pressure, there-is-no-second-take intensity that made my hands go steady, and the rest of the world dissolved into background hum. Some people meditated. Some people ran. I stood behind a camera in a room full of people who needed me to be brilliant, and I was.

I had set up the lighting rig in under three minutes: two strobes, one reflector, and the soft gold gel I carried for exactly this situation. The backdrop was standard-issue team branding, but I had shifted it six inches to the left so the logo sat in the upper third instead of dead center, transforming the composition from corporate headshot into something with visual weight.

Details. My entire career was built on details no one asked for but everyone noticed.

I moved on.

“Cole,” Sandra said, materializing at my elbow with the relieved expression of a woman who had been drowning and just spotted a lifeboat. “Thank God. We’re twenty minutes behind.”

“Not anymore.”

She blinked. “You haven’t even…”

“Send them in.”

And then I worked.

Not frantic. The opposite. I moved players through the setup with the kind of efficiency that only came from having done this a hundred times in a hundred cities and knowing, with bone-deep certainty, that the difference between a usable image and a great one was about four seconds of patience and one perfectly timed sentence.

Brick came first. Of course he did.

“Make me look good, Cole.”

“You do that yourself.”

He grinned. I caught it. The light hit his cheekbones at exactly the angle I had designed the rig to produce, and the image on my tether screen looked like it belonged on a billboard. One take.