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The media gaggle was still in the parking lot when I came out and got into my car to drive over to practice at Hunters Point. They shouted questions. I smiled and waved and ignored them. There were more reporters waiting for me at the high school until the principal came out and told them that if they didn’t leave the school grounds immediately, he was calling the police.

When my players were on the field, they wanted to know if the story about the coach and me was true. I told them it was not. Carlos Quintera couldn’t resist telling me that it was a shame, because he thought we made kind of a cute couple.

I told him that was a very cute remark before making him run five long laps around the entire school property while I started practice without him.

There were no reporters left when I got back into my car. No reporters at the house. No stalkers with phones or cameras in parked cars on the street, at least not that I could see.

But I nearly had a heart attack when I walked through the door and saw Megan Callahan, managing editor of theTribune,sitting on my couch.

“Sorry to frighten you,” she said. “But your friend Rashida let me in. I told her it was sort of an emergency.”

“Your being here can’t possibly involve good news,” I said, tossing my bag on a chair.

“Or any that’s fit to print.”

It was then that I noticed the laptop on the coffee table. Hers, not mine. She opened it.

“I can’t do this anymore. This is a story I wouldn’t poke with a stick.”

I sat down next to her and began to read Seth Dowd’s piece suggesting that Thomas gave drugs to DeLavarious Harmon the day he’d dropped dead on the field.

When I finished, I closed the screen.

“Who’s seen this?”

“Seth, obviously. And Jack and me. That’s it. Jack wanted to keep the circle tight until he decided to run it.” She leaned back and sighed. “And now he’s going to run it, the day after tomorrow. He wants to give you and the coach having your sleepover one more day of oxygen.”

“Well, that’s not happening.”

“What’s not happening?”

“TheSan Francisco Tribunerunning this piece-of-shit story.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to call Dowd and then my brother and tell them that neither one of them has any further legal protection at the paper once Thomas sues them for libel,” I said.

“How do you plan to do that?” Megan Callahan said.

“By firing them, that’s how.”

I turned to her and put out my hand for her to shake.

“Congratulations,” I said. “In addition to retaining your position as managing editor, you’re the new publisher of theSan Francisco Tribune.”

Forty-Nine

AFTER MEGAN LEFT, Idecided to call Jack myself. I thought about waiting until morning, even going over to the paper myself and doing it in person, giving myself the pleasure of seeing the look on his face when I told him to clean out his office. But I decided to get it over with and not to wait.

Either way, the pleasure would still be all mine.

I remembered a rare family dinner a few months after my father had turned over control of the paper to Jack. They’d both known by then, the newspaper business having just begun to shrink down to the size it is now, that they were going to have to start the process of cutting staff if they wanted to keep theTribuneafloat. First a little and then, if that didn’t save enough money to keep the family newspaper viable, a whole lot more.

Joe Wolf said that he should be the one, as the owner of the paper, to tell people that they were being laid off and explain whatever kind of buyouts they were being offered, even though Jack was in charge.

I remembered Jack smiling that day as he listened to our father talking about people who had given their lives to our paper and to the newspaper business. And I remembered thinking that Jack looked in that moment like a real wolf.

Lowercase.