Chapter 238
Chapter 235. The First Match
SEDONA
The ball left my racket, and I knew, before it landed, that I’d hit it correctly.
i
This was the first thing I remembered from eleven years ago that came back exactly as it had been. I had forgotten this feeling existed. I had spent eleven years without it and then, in the first game of the first set of my first competitive match in over a decade, it returned in full, unaltered, like it had been waiting.
I won the first set six-three. But the second set was different. My body, eleven years older than the last time it had done this, started telling me things my mind didn’t want to hear. The legs first, a heaviness in the fourth game that hadn’t been there in the first. Then the specific fatigue that came from a body recovering from years of illness asks, politely but insistently, to be allowed to stop.
I didn’t stop. But I lost the set, four-six, and I felt every game of it the way you feel something you’re losing slowly rather than all at once.
In the changeover before the third set, I drank water, looked at nothing in particular, and did the accounting. Body: tired but not failing. Mind: present. This is data, not a verdict. Dr. Mitchell’s voice, borrowed and internalized, is doing the work it was built for.
I looked up once. Found my mother in the stands. She didn’t wave. She just looked back at me with the specific stillness she had when she was holding something steady, so I didn’t have to hold it myself.
I went back onto the court. The third set went the distance. Six-six. The tiebreak stretched past the standard seven points, past nine, into the rare territory where neither player would yield the two-point margin required to close it. I won a point I shouldn’t have, a return I had no business getting to, off a serve that should have ended it, and lost the next on an unforced error that came from nowhere and everywhere, the specific cruelty of a body that had given everything it had and was now operating on something past that.
Ten points.
I won the final point on a ball that clipped the line, close enough that I held my breath for the call, close enough that I heard, distantly, a sound from the crowd that might have been my mother.
The chair umpire confirmed the call. I had won. I didn’t process it immediately. There’s a version of winning that arrives in the body first and the mind second, the same delay as the good shot earlier, I knew before I understood, and what I knew was simply: it’s over, and I am the one standing.
I looked up at the stands. My mother had both hands pressed to her mouth. My father was standing, actually standing, which I had not seen him do unprompted in longer than I could remember, with an expression I would have to ask Cameron to name for me later, because I didn’t have it myself in that
moment.
Rachel’s sign was exactly as large as she had promised. Enzo was holding it with the resigned dignity of a man who had been informed rather than asked, and who had decided, somewhere over the course of the match, that the dignity was worth performing even though the sign itself embarrassed him slightly.
12
< The First Match
Lake was beside Cameron, mid-sentence, pointing up at the venue’s glass roof.
Claim
“That’s a peregrine falcon,” I would learn later he’d been saying, repeatedly, throughout the entire third set, to anyone who would listen and several who hadn’t asked. “They nest in cities now. Drew told me. It has been watching the whole match p>
Lucian had his hand over his mouth. He’d had it there, Cameron told me afterward, for most of the third
set.
I didn’t know, in that moment, about the two men near the east entrance who weren’t watching the match at all, who were watching the crowd, the exits, the specific patterns Marcus Reeve’s firm had trained them
to notice.
I knew the ball. The geometry of the court. The sound of a clean hit, returning to me after eleven years like something I’d never actually lost, just set down somewhere and forgotten I’d set down.
I had won.
The corridor off the court was narrow, fluorescent, smelling of the specific antiseptic newness of a venue built within the last decade. I walked it with my bag over my shoulder and my body announcing, in the aftermath of adrenaline withdrawing, every single thing it had done for the past three hours.
Mrs. Peterson was at the end of the corridor.
I saw her first, the familiar shape of her, the coat I recognized from a hundred phone-call backgrounds, and then I saw who was beside her, and I stopped walking entirely.
Nick.
He was holding a sign. Cardboard, hand-lettered, the letters large and slightly uneven in the way of a six-year-old who had clearly written it himself with minimal adult correction.
Go, Mum.
He held it up the moment he saw me looking. I didn’t move for a second. The corridor, the fluorescent light, the specific impossibility of his standing there holding that sign after everything, the hearing, the interim order, Logan’s permission that I would learn later had been a calculated gesture for February’s benefit and didn’t matter to me even slightly in this moment, not even a fraction, because none of that mattered next to the fact of him.
He was here, and he held the sign higher. I went to him.
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Florence
A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.