Chapter 255
Chapter 249. Centre Court.
SEDONA
The draw had put us in the same venue on the same afternoon. Maria, with her usual flatness, called it “an interesting scheduling coincidence,” making it clear she didn’t believe in coincidences, just like the rest of
Catherine’s invitational match was on Court 3. Mine was on Centre Court, forty minutes later. The two draws ran in parallel through the same Saturday, like two rivers flowing through the same valley without touching.
I didn’t think about her court while I warmed up.
I thought about Nick.
He was somewhere in the crowd. Logan’s access arrangement, carefully negotiated and deliberately structured by Adaeze in a way that gave Nick the choice rather than dictating it for him, had worked out so that today, for the first time in his entire life, my son would watch his mother play.
I didn’t know exactly where he was sitting. I had asked Mrs. Peterson not to tell me in advance, because I needed to walk onto the court with my full attention on the match and not spend the first set scanning the stands for a six-year-old’s face. I trusted he was there. That was enough to hold onto without letting it become a distraction I couldn’t afford.
I served first. The toss felt clean, the contact cleaner, the specific feeling of a body that had spent eleven years away and was, finally, fully reacquainted with itself.
Somewhere across the venue, on Court 3, Catherine was three games into her own match.
I knew this only because Cameron mentioned it once, quietly, between my own sets, not as commentary, just as information, the kind he passed along without editorializing because editorializing wasn’t his job today. Catherine was playing well, apparently. She usually did. I had no interest in the score.
What I understood, standing at the baseline between points, bouncing the ball twice before my toss, was the specific structural irony of the afternoon that nobody in either crowd was likely to name out loud. Two women who had orbited the same man, the same household, the same six-year-old’s daily life from entirely different positions, one welcomed in, one pushed out and slowly fighting her way back, were, for one ordinary Saturday afternoon, simply playing the sport they were good at. No confrontation. No scene. Just two adjacent courts, two separate scoreboards, the strange flat dignity of competition continuing regardless of everything that sat underneath it.
I won my first set, six-four. I didn’t think about Catherine again until the changeover before the second set That’s when I let myself wonder, briefly, whether Nick had chosen yet. Whether he was still deciding, in that careful, deliberate way he decided everything, which court deserved his attention on an afternoon when two people in his life were playing at the same time. Forty feet and one chain-link fence apart.
I won the second set in straight games, six-two. Faster than I expected. My body found its rhythm the way it had in the first match, weeks ago. Knowledge arriving before my eyes confirmed it. The ball is going exactly where I asked it to, more often than not.
12
Claim The match was over in under ninety minutes. I shook hands at the net. I heard the applause, distant and general, the specific sound of a crowd acknowledging a result rather than a person. I gathered my bag. I Tooked up, finally, at the stands, allowing myself, now that the match had ended and there was nothing left to lose by looking, the search I’d been disciplining myself out of for the past ninety minutes. I found him in the third row where he. was standing. Not sitting with the rest of the crowd, not clapping politely the way the people around him were, standing, both hands cupped around his mouth, shouting something I couldn’t make out over the general noise of the venue, but didn’t need to. His face was doing the thing Lake had described weeks ago at the school gate, except bigger now, fuller, the unguarded enormity of a six-year-old who had just watched his mother win. Beside him, Mrs. Peterson had a hand on his shoulder, not restraining, just steadying. He hadn’t gone to watch Catherine. I would learn later, much later, in a quiet conversation weeks after all of this had settled into something more permanent, that Nick had been offered the choice explicitly, that Logan’s lawyer had made sure the choice was documented as entirely his own, no pressure either direction, and that Nick had thought about it for exactly the length of time it took him to say, with total six-year-old certainty: I want to watch Mum. I didn’t know any of that yet, standing at the edge of the court with my racket bag over my shoulder and my whole body still catching up with what it had just done. I just saw him. Standing, both hands cupped, shouting my name into a crowd of people who had no idea what it had taken to bring this exact moment into existence. He saw when he noticed I had seen. His whole body went still for half a second, the same stillness from the school gate, the recalibration of something too large arriving all at once, and then both arms went up over his head, the both-arms wave Lake had correctly identified weeks ago as the one that meant actual feelings, not politeness, not performance. I raised my racket above my head, the closest thing I had to a wave with my hands full, and held it there. Forty feet away, on Court 3, Catherine’s match continued without either of us watching it. It didn’t matter. I had won. He had watched. And in the third row of a Chicago tennis venue, my son’s face held everything I had spent eleven years and seven months and one entire reconstructed life trying to get back to. I didn’t need the score to tell me what this afternoon had actually been about. Comments LUCK DRAW > Vote 551 Florence A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.