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“We’ll see about that.”

“I guess we will.”

He shook his head, almost sadly. Or smugly. As if somehow I were the schmuck.

“You think you’re so much better than us. And then you’re willing to crawl right down into the mud with me.”

“If that’s what it takes to get the win,” I said.

“Enjoy it while you can.”

“I already am.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Danny said.

“Get what?”

“A nick here, a nick there, and pretty soon you’re bleeding to death.”

Danny smiled then, as if he knew something I didn’t. Or as if he was the one who’d won something tonight, though I couldn’t imagine what.

“See you in the next news cycle.”

As I headed down the hall, I heard him call out, “You and the coach.”

Forty-Five

I GAVE MY TICKETSto the Eagles game to my friend Rashida and her husband. On this day I watched from Thomas’s suite, hoping that my football weekend might turn out to be a clean sweep, because my Hunters Point Bears had beaten Galileo 27–6 the day before.

It was 17–17, middle of the third quarter, when Ted Skyler was knocked out of the game with a concussion, and the next thing everybody saw at Wolves Stadium was Billy “Money” McGee running out onto the field to replace him.

The suite had been quite loud all afternoon but went quiet now.

“Okay,” Thomas said. “This shit just got very real.”

After Billy handed the ball off on first down, Joe Buck said to Troy Aikman on television, “So far so good. Nobody got arrested.”

Second and ten. It went back to being so quiet in the suite that I thought I could hear my own breathing.

“It’s a passing down,” Troy Aikman said. “I expect they’ll give him an easy one to get him into the flow of the game.”

It was exactly what Ryan, who had taken over the play calling, tried to do. Billy was supposed to straighten up once he’d taken the snap from center, then throw quickly to Calvin Robeson on the outside. In theory, the ball wouldn’t even have to travel ten yards in the air.

But the Eagles cornerback was expecting the same kind of throw, reading Billy McGee’s eyes the whole time, then stepping in front of Calvin and intercepting the ball and running sixty yards, untouched, for a touchdown.

Now it was all of Wolves Stadium that had gone into a stunned silence in response to how suddenly and disastrously the day had changed for the home team.

“Well,” Thomas said, “at least everybody knows he’s back.”

I said, “Remind me of something. Who took that shot to the head—my ex-husband or Money?”

The next time we got the ball, Billy was nearly intercepted again. By the time the Wolves punted the ball away, he still hadn’t completed a pass, at least not to anybody on our team.

I whispered to Thomas, “Plenty of time.”

Thomas whispered back, “I’m starting to wish he was stilldoingtime.”

We were still behind 24–17 when we got the ball on our ten yard line with just under a minute left in the game. Billy’s first-down pass was batted down at the line of scrimmage. The next one he threw wildly out-of-bounds.