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"Can you trust me?" She said it without lifting her voice at the end, like a question that had lived in her chest as a statement long enough to lose its inflection. "Not in theory. Can you actually believe, after all of this, that I won't go back? That I didn't post tonight because I was hurting and reacted to it? That it's real, and I chose it, and I'm going to be able to hold it?"

I was quiet.

This was the question underneath every other question. Cam knew it was, which was why she'd asked it out loud instead of waiting for me to get there on my own. She'd been paying attention this whole time to what I needed and how I needed it, and what I needed was the real question, asked plainly, so I could give it a real answer.

"I don't know yet," I said.

She held my gaze and didn't flinch.

"I want to," I said. "I'm sitting here, aren't I? I called you. I opened that door." I pressed my palms flat on my thighs. "But trust isn't a declaration, Cam. I've learned that. It's a practice. It gets built on ordinary days, when there's no post and no dramatic phone call and nothing extraordinary at all. Just a Tuesday. I'm going to need to see how you do on ordinary Tuesdays."

She was quiet for a moment, turning it over the way she turned everything over.

"Tell me what ordinary Tuesdays look like," she said. "I want to know."

Oh.

Oh, that was the right answer. It wasn't I promise I'll be different, or I swear on my career and my championship rings. It wasn't a sweeping declaration that the fear was gone forever. It was just: tell me your Tuesday, and I'll show up in it.

A gentle crack broke through my sternum. It didn't hurt. It was the opposite of hurting. It felt like a window opening in a room that had been sealed shut for years.

"Tuesdays," I said when I trusted my voice again. "On Tuesdays, I get an oat milk latte, extra shot, from the place on Fifth where the barista has been spelling my name wrong for six months, and I document it every single time, because it is genuinely funnier every week. I take claims for eight hours. I try to have conversations with Mia across our cubicle divide without our supervisor noticing, which has required us to develop a nonverbal communication system that I maintain has made us functionally psychic." I watched her face. "I stop at the grocery store on the way home and try to talk myself out of the expensive cheese, and then I buy the expensive cheese, anyway. I come home and eat dinner standing up at my counter, watching whatever show I'm halfway through. I text my brother Jordan when he's sure our parents aren't around." I paused. "And I fall asleep with a white noise app, because my brain doesn't know how to be quiet in the dark."

"That's a Tuesday," she said.

"That's a Tuesday."

"Okay." Her voice was quiet and steady and completely certain. "I want all of it. The barista who can't spell your name. The expensive cheese. I want to be the person you text from the grocery store when you're trying to talk yourself out of the cheese."

I pressed my lips together hard. My eyes were doing their signature move, the one where they refuse to stay dry at the worst possible moments, because apparently they have opinions, and their opinions are, as always, inconvenient.

"You're so annoying," I informed her.

"I know."

"Argument number one. The tunnel. Unfairly tall, unfairly intense, and already completely convinced you were right about everything."

"I wasn't right about you."

"No. You really weren't." I let out a slow breath. And then I said it, plainly, as a fact that I hadn't known was the truth all along. "I'm in love with you. I've been in love with you since somewhere around the third argument, and I've been furious about it the entire time. You were so profoundly inconvenient and so infuriatingly sure of everything, and you kept looking at me like I was a problem you couldn't solve, and I could not get you out of my head no matter what I did."

Her expression broke open. "The third argument."

"You have this habit where you go very still and very focused when you're about to disagree with someone. It's probably the most maddening quality I've ever encountered in another human being. I clocked it happening during argument number three, and my internal reaction was, oh no. Oh, this is going to be a disaster."

The corner of her mouth lifted. "You had a whole crisis."

"I had a documented crisis. There are records." I dropped my hands into my lap. "Your turn. You've been holding back since you walked in."

Cam didn't lean forward this time. She didn't arrange herself or gather her thoughts into a game plan. She just looked at me long enough that I felt the full weight of it, and then she started talking.

"The first time you came to a game," she said, "you were on your phone for most of the first half. I could see you from the court."

I opened my mouth.

"I'm not done." Her voice was low. "I noticed. I kept noticing. And I hated that I noticed, because you were exactly who I'd decided you were. The Instagram girl. The one who didn't care, who was there to be seen and not to see. Except I'd make a pass I was proud of, and I'd look over, and you weren't watching, and I'd feel..." She stopped. "Disappointed. That you'd missed it. Which made no sense. I didn't know you. I had no reason to want you to see anything I did."

She looked at her hands for a moment, then back up at me.