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"You can brainstorm and receive affection at the same time."

"I cannot. It disrupts my process."

"Your process takes thirty seconds."

"My process is a sacred and serious artistic endeavor, Cameron, and I will not have it..."

"Harper."

"What?"

"I love you."

She stopped. She looked up at me. The dimple appeared.

"I love you too," she said. "Now go talk to the cameras before Bianca has a coronary."

I went.

The press room was packed. More cameras than I'd seen at a postgame since our last championship. I sat down behind the microphone with Coach Lopez on one side and Destiny on the other, and I answered three questions about the game plan and executed exactly as planned.

Then a reporter in the second row, a woman I'd known for years, stood up.

"Cameron, there were obviously some cameras on you after the buzzer tonight." A ripple of laughter flooded the room, and I smiled. "Can you tell us who you were celebrating with?"

Bianca, standing against the back wall, gave me the slightest tilt of her head. Your call. It had always been my call. It had just never felt like one.

I leaned into the microphone.

"That was Harper," I said. "She's my girlfriend."

Twelve years. Twelve years of practiced deflection and careful nothing in this exact chair. And three words, plain and true, said into a microphone in front of the whole league.

My voice didn't shake once.

"She's also the reason I played like that tonight," I said. "So if you want to know what changed, that's the answer. Next question."

When I came out of the press room, the tunnel was almost empty.

The crowd noise had faded to a far-off hum. Security had started clearing the corridor. The concrete walls held the cold the way they always did after a game, and the overhead lights buzzed, and somewhere a cart was rattling toward the loading dock.

And there she was.

Leaning against the wall, right where she'd stood seven weeks ago. Same spot. Same cinderblock. My jersey on her back. Her head bent over her phone, her thumbs moving, the light of the screen on her face.

I stopped walking and just looked at her for a second.

Seven weeks ago, I'd walked out of this tunnel after a win and seen a woman on her phone, and I'd decided in about a second that I knew exactly who she was. Shallow. Careless. There to be seen, not to see. I'd been so sure. I'd been so angry that she wasn't watching me.

I'd been wrong about everything.

Except that it mattered to me, from the very first second, whether or not she was watching.

"You're on your phone," I said.

She looked up.

Her face did what it only did for me now, all of it at once. The light and the warmth and the dimple and the tears she'd apparently been crying for the last twenty minutes, and the joy underneath all of it like bedrock.