Chapter Twenty
1316 Words
She finds her opening two days later, in what's supposed to be a routine follow-up interview — a short, scheduled check-in ahead of Team USA's next group-stage game, arranged through official channels, ostensibly to gather updated quotes for the feature piece Callum is still, with increasing impatience, waiting on.
They're twelve minutes into safe, professional territory — line combinations, tournament fatigue, the specific pressure of an undefeated group stage — when Mara sets down her pen, deliberately, and looks at him directly across the small conference table.
"I want to ask you something off the record," she says. "If that's all right."
Adrian's expression shifts, wary but not closed, not yet. "Okay."
"In the corridor, after the injury scare. You said you wanted to know what happened to me. After you left." She keeps her voice level, careful, though her pulse is loud in her own ears. "I'm asking you the same thing now. What happened, Adrian. Why did you leave without a word. I've spent five years constructing theories, and I'm tired of theories. I want the actual answer."
The shift in his face is immediate and total — the careful warmth of the last several days replaced, in an instant, by something guarded and shuttered that Mara hasn't seen from him since the very first press conference, five years of practiced composure slamming back into place like a door built for exactly this purpose.
"Mara."
"You said you'd tell me. When I was ready. I'm ready."
"Not like this." His voice is tight, controlled, but there's something underneath it that sounds, to Mara's practiced ear, less like anger and more like panic. "Not in an interview room. Not with a recorder—"
"The recorder's off. It's been off for ten minutes." She holds up her hands, empty, to prove it. "This isn't for a story, Adrian. This is just me. Asking you a question I've needed answered for five years."
"I can't do this right now." He stands, abruptly, the chair scraping loud against the floor, and something about the suddenness of it lands like a physical blow. "I have a game in two days. I can't — I need to be focused. I can't have this conversation and then go be a captain for my team like nothing happened."
"So when," Mara says, and hears her own voice c***k on the word, five years of careful professional composure finally, fully failing her. "When, Adrian. You keep saying not now. Not here. Not like this. It's been five years of not now. When is it ever going to be the right time?"
"I don't know." He says it quietly, and there's real pain in it, real and raw in a way that should soften her and instead just makes the whole moment worse, because pain without an actual answer attached to it isn't comfort, it's just more of the same silence she's been living inside since a text message arrived on her phone six years ago. "I don't know when it's going to be the right time. I just know it isn't now."
"That's not good enough."
"I know it's not good enough!" His voice rises, sharp and sudden, more raw than she's heard from him all week, and then, catching himself, he lowers it again, visibly working to rein the moment back in. "I know it's not good enough, Mara. I've known that for five years. Do you think I don't know exactly how badly I handled everything? I think about it constantly. I just — I can't unpack it in a conference room with a game in two days and an entire team counting on me to have my head on straight."
"Then when," Mara says again, quieter now, exhausted rather than sharp, all the fight suddenly gone out of her at once. "Just tell me when, and I'll wait. I've waited five years already. I can wait a little longer if I actually know there's an end to it."
Adrian doesn't answer right away. He stands at the edge of the table, jaw tight, something visibly warring behind his eyes, and for a moment Mara thinks he's actually going to give her something — a date, a promise, anything at all to hold onto.
"I don't know," he says instead, finally, quiet and defeated. "I'm sorry. I don't know."
It isn't enough. It has never been enough, five years of not enough compounding into something Mara doesn't know how to carry any further, and she nods, once, professional composure reassembling itself with brutal, practiced speed around the wreckage of the last five minutes.
"Okay," she says. "Thank you for your time."
She gathers her things — recorder, notebook, the folder she's stopped even pretending is for anything other than carrying around a version of herself she can't quite put down — and leaves the conference room without looking back, walking fast down the corridor with her spine straight and her face composed, five years of practice holding, barely, until she's alone in the stairwell and can finally let it fall apart.
She doesn't cry, not exactly, not even alone. She sits on the concrete landing with her back against the wall, the way she did the very first day, and breathes, four counts in, four counts held, four counts out, furious at herself in a way she can't fully articulate — furious for hoping, furious for pushing, furious for believing, even for a moment, that this time might actually be different.
You knew better, she tells herself, matching the thought to her breathing. You knew exactly what this would cost, and you asked anyway. What did you think was going to happen.
She thinks about Selene's words from the airport bar, days ago now — you're falling for him again — and understands, sitting alone on a stairwell landing in a city she still doesn't fully know the shape of, exactly how true that observation was, and exactly how little good it's doing her now.
She thinks about the feature piece, still barely started, due in three days, and understands, with sudden, total clarity, that she has no idea how she's going to write six hundred honest words about a man who won't give her five true sentences in private.
She thinks, mostly, about a promise made in a stairwell six years ago, and the specific, unbearable weight of realizing that some promises don't actually die when the person who made them stops trying to keep them. They just sit there, unresolved, costing you a little more every time you let yourself hope they might still somehow come true.
By the time she stands, steadies herself, and heads back toward the hotel, Mara has arrived at a conclusion she's been circling for days without letting herself fully land on it.
This assignment was never going to be something she could get through with professionalism alone. She knew that, somewhere, the moment she saw his photo on that roster sheet in a hotel elevator two weeks ago, and she's spent every day since trying to convince herself otherwise, building careful armor out of interview questions and scene-setters and safe professional distance, telling herself the story of a journalist doing her job.
It was never just a job. It was never going to be. And she's beginning to understand, walking alone through a corridor toward whatever comes next, that finishing this assignment is going to cost her something no byline is ever going to be worth — not the story she came here to write, but the whole careful, protected life she spent five years building, one board at a time, over the wreckage of the last time she loved him.
She doesn't know yet whether that cost is worth paying.
She's starting, for the first time since she landed in this city, to suspect she's going to find out either way.
- Writer
