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I called ahead to Venticello, just a few blocks away, and ordered a pizza and salad and circled back to pick it up. I brought it home and reheated the pizza and poured myself a glass of red wine and ate at the counter in my kitchen while trying to educate myself about the Wolves’ salary cap situation, which was about as easy to understand as the federal tax code.

The trick in pro football is to spend as much money as you can while managing to stay under the salary cap so as not to get killed with penalties if you spend too much. It’s why all teams now employ a SWAT team of what are known as capologists, people whose understanding of the numbers is as important as the coaches’ understanding ofX’s andO’s.

I already knew that Thomas wanted to trade for anyone and everyone he thought might help us. But I needed to know which transactions we could manage, within reason. I also needed to know which available players might make sense for us and which ones were too expensive, even in the short run.

Thomas,I thought.

The one member of my family I knew I could trust, now that I had proof that I couldn’t trust my mother. If I ever really could trust my mother. But even though Thomas would have my back in the end, if for no other reason than how much he hated Danny and Jack, I didn’t know exactly howmuchI could trust my kid brother. And how far.

So who could I count on the most these days?

The answer to that one was easy.

I could count on my coach. I wanted him in the foxhole with me.

I read up on the salary cap for as long as I could. Tried to watch a movie, but by the time I was half an hour into it I couldn’t follow the story, about a rivalry between two sisters.

So against my better judgment I turned the television to the West Coast edition ofSportsCenteron ESPN and watched and listened to various NFL insiders and pundits pundit away until they were blue in the face—Wolves blue?I asked myself—about our signing of Billy “Money” McGee, most of them acting as if his coming back to the NFL, even in a backup role, was the end of everything good and decent.

I was about to go to bed when the doorbell rang.

As late as it was, and not expecting company this close to midnight, I smiled when I looked through the peephole and saw who it was on the front porch.

“We need to talk,” Ryan Morrissey said.

“Any subject in particular?”

“I need to quit.”

Forty

DANNY WOLF SAT ACROSSthe dining-room table that, when he was growing up, he always thought should have been covered by a steel cage. This rare breakfast together hadn’t been an invitation—more like a command performance.

It wasn’t yet eight in the morning, but his mother was already dressed as if for some kind of photo shoot at one of the ladies’ lunches she seemed to attend on a daily basis. This woman, bless her heart, still treated getting dressed up, and dining out, like full-time jobs.

Elise Wolf thought nothing of changing her outfits yet gave no thought to, or acknowledgment of, her advancing age. “I always wonder what it will be like when I’m old,” Danny heard her say from time to time, playing her imagined role as the queen in her own version ofThe Crown.

Except she’s queen of the House of Wolves,Danny thought,not the House of Windsor.

“You’re sure this will work?” Elise Wolf said to him now, sipping some of her special tea. “I assured John that you had assuredmethat it would work to our mutual benefit.”

“I presented things to our coach in a way that I’m sure John Gallo would appreciate,” Danny said. “One of those offers I frankly don’t think he can refuse.”

She gave him one of her withering looks, one he didn’t have the heart to tell her didn’t scare him the way it had when he was a little boy.

Well, maybe still just a little bit.

“I certainly hope you don’t make yourGodfatherjokes in his presence. John is a legitimate businessman.”

Sure he is.

“You need to give me more credit.”

She sighed theatrically.

“I try, Daniel. Lord knows I try my goddamn ass off.”

If only, he thought, the rest of the world could hear how the queen of the manor really talks, especially to him. He’d heard much worse language, of course, from both his parents, especially when they’d start to go at each other. Had heard it his whole life. The Wolf children joked that if they’d had a swear pot for their parents when they were growing up, they wouldn’t have had to wait to inherit their share of the family fortune.