I changed the subject back to football, as Coach covertly checked his watch, confirming my suspicion that he had only shown up to be nice and was biding his time until he could leave. Sure enough, about thirty minutes later, after we'd both drifted into different conversations, he found me again, tapped me on the shoulder, and said he really needed to go prep for the next game.

I nodded and told him I understood.

"I brought you a little something. It's in my car. Want to come out with me and grab it?" he asked.

"Okay," I said, feeling happier than I should have.

"I meant to give you this thing the other night," he said as we walked to the foyer. "But then Miller showed up ... and I forgot."

I nodded, both of us falling silent as we walked outside, then over to his car. I stood in the gra.s.s, watching as he opened the pa.s.senger door, reached down on the floor, and grabbed a flat, rectangular package, wrapped in brown paper.

He handed it to me and said, "Consider it a congratulations and good-luck gift rolled into one."

Relieved that he hadn't called it a "goodbye" gift, I took it from him and said, "I don't know what to say ... Thanks, Coach."

"You're welcome, girl," he said, his eyes switching on, becoming all twinkly. "I'm real proud of you." He bit his lower lip on the right side and said, "Now go back in there and enjoy yourself. And don't let Ryan steal all your thunder."

"Thanks, Coach," I said again and very nearly hugged him.

I didn't, though, just stood there as he got in his car and drove away. Feeling light-headed, I went back inside, hoping n.o.body had missed me. But as I stowed the package in the foyer, Lucy emerged from the hall powder room, her quick mind processing every detail.

"Where were you? What's that?" she said, staring down at my gift.

"Outside," I said. "Your dad gave me something."

"What did he give you?"

I shrugged and said I didn't know.

"Well, open it!"

"Later."

"No. Now. I'm so curious to see what he came up with without my mother's help!"

Her delivery was straightforward, but I knew her well enough to know what she was thinking. That he had gone to a lot of trouble for me, just months after he had completely forgotten her birthday. I felt a guilty pang as she scooped up the package and walked back toward the party.

"Look, Neil!" she announced as everyone paused and watched her. "My dad got Shea a present! Wasn't that sweet of him?"

Neil nodded and smiled, but something in his eyes confirmed my hunch. It was fleeting, but I could see the look of sympathy or consolation. I was suddenly sure that they had discussed my friendship with her dad-and equally certain that she had confessed her feelings of jealousy-or at least frustration that she and her father seemed to have such trouble connecting when it was so effortless for him and me.

Ryan and a half dozen other guests followed her over to the sofa, where she instructed me to sit and open it. My cheeks burned as I carefully peeled back the paper to reveal a matted and framed newspaper article. I recognized it immediately as the first full-length feature I had written for my high school newspaper, nearly twenty years ago. It was a rambling ode t.i.tled "Why We Love Walker" along with a photo I had snapped myself of Coach Carr at practice, and another one of Walker's then quarterback, Adam Gipe, dropping back in the pocket, his arm c.o.c.ked, ready for a bullet pa.s.s. Next to my byline, in a patch of white s.p.a.ce, Coach Carr had scrawled with a Sharpie: "We love you, too, girl. Knew you could do it! Coach C."

As everyone processed what it was, there was a chorus of oohs and aahs as J.J. seized the moment to hand me a teal fountain pen and a Walker lamp, both of which I recognized from the school store. "This is from everyone here," J.J. said, his voice turning formal. "To thank you for two decades of diligent service."

"Two decades?" I said. "It hasn't been that long."

J.J. reminded me of the volunteer work I had done as a kid, detailing some of the more mundane tasks. I smiled, as Roxann Moody, our equipment manager, cupped her hand around her mouth and yelled, "Speech! Speech!"

Flanked by Lucy and Ryan, I bit the bullet and thanked everyone for coming, telling them how much I appreciated the gifts, then giving a special thanks to J.J. and Mary Ann, followed by a reminder that I'd still see everyone often. I closed by raising my gla.s.s and saying, "Go Broncos." Everyone clapped and whistled, and I thought I was in the clear. But then Ryan quieted the crowd again and said, "I'd like to say something."

I had no idea what he had up his sleeve, but I thought of what Coach had told me in the driveway. He definitely knew his former quarterback well. The room was absolutely silent, pure adoration on everyone's face as Ryan continued. "I'd like to thank J.J. and Mary Ann as well for including me tonight," he said, expertly pausing. "As always, it's great to be back home, especially now that I'm with Shea. I just wanted to thank her for being the girl she is. And all of you for being so good to her. It makes me proud as h.e.l.l to be a Bronco."

Everyone swooned while I sweated, fanning myself with my hand, making desperate eye contact with Lucy, who knew exactly what I was thinking. Make it all end. Then, just when I thought it couldn't get more uncomfortable, Ryan reached into his pocket and handed me a small wrapped box.

"Open it!" Lucy demanded, and I knew there was no stopping the tide now, so I tore off the wrapping paper as quickly as I could, discovering a gray velvet box, the kind that houses expensive jewelry. Holding my breath, I opened the hinged lid, the room now completely silent as we all gazed down at two huge sparkling diamond studs.

"Congratulations, Shea," he said, a cue for feverish applause and a few whistles.

"Holy s.h.i.t," Lucy gasped.

"These are ... way too much," I said to Ryan.

He shook his head. "No. They're not."

"Put them on," Lucy said.

I froze. All I wanted to do was give them back to Ryan, but I knew that wasn't an option, at least not now, so I took off my ordinary gold hoops and replaced them with the only real diamonds I'd ever owned.

Speechless, I looked at Ryan and shook my head, while everyone kept grinning and gawking. At me, at him, at the huge rocks now adorning my lobes. I made myself smile, trying to piece together how this had happened, how we got to this so fast, from s.e.x to jealousy to diamonds.

I reached up to touch one of the stones, almost hoping that they weren't real. Or maybe they were real, but Ryan was so wealthy that it was like a regular guy giving a girl flowers. Then again, maybe things really were getting serious.

Whatever was happening, I had no idea what to say or how to act or, most important, how to extricate myself from the spotlight. So I just kept my eyes down, staring at Coach's framed article lying on the coffee table, and his sloppy, half-printed, half-cursive message: We love you, too, girl.

That night, I tried to give back the earrings. Ryan refused, then got agitated. "They were a gift," he said. "Do you always try to return gifts?"

"They're too expensive," I said for the third time.

"Not for me," he said. "I can afford them."

"But-"

He cut me off with a kiss and said, "Seriously, Shea. You're going to p.i.s.s me off if you keep this up. I bought them for you. I want you to have them. Now shut up."

"Okay," I said, nodding and kissing him back. Then I pulled my hair into a makeshift bun, turning my head from side to side. "How do they look?"

"Gorgeous," he said. "Like you."

"So are we really together ... like this?" I blurted out.

"Like what?"

"Like diamond-stud-earring together?"

He laughed and said, "It's looking that way, yeah."

"Don't you think it feels ... fast?" I said.

"Yeah. A little," he said, which made me feel better. At least he wasn't pretending that this pace was normal. "But if you think about it-we've known each other forever. It's not like we just met ..."

"That's true," I said.

"And I'm very decisive. I know what I want."

I smiled. "And what's that?"

"You, baby," he said, leaning down to kiss me.

I kissed him back, feeling like the luckiest girl in the world.

Eighteen.

The following Monday, two days after a decisive win over Arkansas, I began my job as a sports reporter. Smiley didn't give me a start time, but I left my apartment at six in the morning so that I could beat rush-hour traffic and arrive at the Bank of America Plaza in Dallas by seven. His a.s.sistant, an older lady channeling the sixties with her teased hair and cat-eye gla.s.ses, met me in the lobby and humorlessly escorted me to his office.

"Good morning, Ms. Rigsby," Smiley said, glancing up from a completed New York Times crossword. His office reeked of cigars, though there was no sign of ashtrays or smoke. There was, however, a half-empty bottle of scotch on the corner of his desk.

"Good morning," I said.

Smiley cleared his throat, as if on the brink of issuing a proper welcome, but thought better of it. "C'mon. I'll show you around," he said instead.

He then embarked on a tour of the newsroom, consisting mostly of a maze of cubicles under drab fluorescent lighting. Smiley made a few introductions in what he referred to as the "sports corner" of the floor, but only when he absolutely couldn't avoid it, often omitting the names of his colleagues while making me sound as uninteresting and green as he possibly could. "This is Shea Rigsby. Kenny Stone's replacement. She comes from sports information at Walker, but contends she can be objective," he said once, mumbling a footnote: "We'll see about that."

He pointed out the a.s.signment desk, where two phones were currently manned, explaining that it was a command center where various leads were phoned in on hard news stories. "Doesn't really apply to us," he said. "Our stories aren't generally a surprise. Although these days you never know what athletes are going to do ... If someone shoots his girlfriend or tortures dogs, it'll be phoned in right there."

I nodded as we stuck our heads into a bare-bones break room with a microwave and refrigerator, then an even more dismal room housing a watercooler and a copier adorned with a sign that said: ANOTHER d.a.m.n PAPER JAM. He concluded our tour with my very own cubicle, located just outside his office. Lucky me. The whole floor was much quieter and less glamorous than I'd imagined, and I felt a dash of disappointment as I reminded myself that this wasn't the Woodward and Bernstein era of journalism and most writers probably worked from home.

"So that's it," he said curtly. "Any questions?"

I shook my head.

"Okay, then. Your first a.s.signment. We need a pregame piece on the WalkerBaylor matchup. Give me eight hundred, not a word more because s.p.a.ce is tight. d.a.m.n advertisers," he grumbled. "As for angles-maybe focus on the running back situation. Maybe look at the rash of injuries that squad has suffered ... Find out if any of the a.s.sistant coaches hate each other. And I need it by eight A.M. tomorrow. Not a minute later."

Before I could so much as nod, Smiley turned and headed for his office as the guy one cubicle over glanced my way and said, "And you caught him on a good day."

I smiled, and he reached over the part.i.tion and shook my hand. "Gordon Chambers."

"Shea Rigsby," I said, feeling an instant rapport with this new colleague, as much for his comment as for his face. Everything about it was warm-from his honey-brown skin, to his full lips, to the dimples in his rounded cheeks that remained even when he stopped smiling. "What's your beat?"

"Dallas Cowboys."

I must have looked impressed because he said, "The low man on that totem pole. I do social media. Smiley's necessary evil. And I cover injuries. Pulled hamstrings? I'm your guy." His grin grew wider, his dimples deeper.

I smiled, wondering if he had ever talked to Ryan, as I put down my bag, then did a cursory exploration of my cubicle. I opened and closed a few drawers cluttered with stray rubber bands, paper clips, and a package of saltines that another reporter had left behind. Then I adjusted my chair, and inspected the ancient desktop computer, trying to figure out how to power it on.

"I wouldn't bother with that piece of s.h.i.t," Gordon said as I noticed that he was typing on a big silver Mac.

"Right," I said, fishing my laptop out of my bag and plugging it in, then staring at my ESPN home screen for a few sh.e.l.l-shocked seconds, wondering where to begin.

"Wow. You better get off that page before Smiley sees it," Gordon said as he pa.s.sed by my cubicle with his empty coffee mug. "Don't you know that's the network that puts entertainment ahead of sports? Get it? ESPN."

"Right. Thanks," I said, shutting down the browser, then pulling up a blank doc.u.ment and typing BaylorWalker at the top of the screen. It was an inauspicious start to say the least, especially when coupled with the utter blankness in my brain. It was as if I'd never read a pregame piece in my life. The escalating din around me didn't do much to quell my nerves, as the few writers on the news end of the floor seemed to be typing away with great caffeinated efficiency, but I took a few deep breaths and told myself that they probably weren't penning Pulitzers. They were just diligently doing their job, covering mundane events-funerals and fires and fairs. Or, in our corner of the sports cube farm, pulled hamstrings. With that in mind, I took another deep breath, then went to Baylor's official athletic site, clicked on the football tab, and got to work. Just write what you know, I told myself. You were born to do this job.

The day pa.s.sed quickly, but, by two o'clock, I had yet to eat lunch and had written only four sentences, none of them keepers. The only really productive thing I did, other than fill out a bunch of forms for human resources, was schedule a phone interview with the Baylor sports information director for that evening. I had also brainstormed a few basic questions to ask him, which was pretty easy to do given the number of times I had heard J.J. on the receiving end of such interviews. Meanwhile, I eavesdropped on Smiley lecturing Gordon for overusing adverbs and, apparently an even greater transgression, synonyms for said.

"He said, she said, they said," Smiley shouted, socking one fist into the other open palm. "That's the only attribution you should use in here. Keep it invisible. We want to hear what the guy said, not how he said it. Should I hang a sign in your cubicle?"

I couldn't hear Gordon's reply, only Smiley droning on. "So I don't want to hear your sources comment, claim, a.s.sert, suggest, state, disclose, imply, admit, concur, argue, or remark. And they sure as h.e.l.l better not guffaw, chuckle, or chortle either."

As he dismissed Gordon, he caught me looking at him and barked, "Did you get that, Rigsby?"

I nodded, resisting the urge to tell him that I heard what he said.

Later that afternoon, I headed back to Walker for football practice. It was like high school all over again, with Coach granting me access that he didn't give other reporters. I caught him afterward, as he was walking back up to the football complex, and asked if had a few minutes to talk about the Baylor game. He glanced at his watch and said he needed to get home to meet his handyman, something about a problem gutter, but could talk later.

"When's a good time?" I said.

"For you? Anytime," he said, patting my shoulder.

Around eight o'clock that evening, I worked up the nerve to send him a tentative text: Is now a good time to chat?

He wrote back: Not alone. Can you text me the questions?

Okay, I typed, then specified that we were on the record before asking him to confirm our starting backfield.

He texted back: They can all play. Who do YOU think I should start?

I laughed, then typed: Ha. If I pick your lineup, will you write my piece?

I stared at my phone, waiting, knowing that he was a slow one-finger typist: I don't think your readers would appreciate my third-grade writing style.

I smiled and wrote: Don't try to play the dumb jock with me. I know better.

And the conversation continued from there, the screen filling with our banter: CCC: Really. And what else do you know?

Me: I know you're sitting in that big armchair, with the TV on mute.

CCC: Ha. You got me.

Me: Probably with a Shiner Bock on your drink stand next to the remote.