POV: Celeste
I am still staring at the screen when Jada puts her hand over mine and I pull away because I cannot be touched right now, cannot be handled, cannot have anyone being gentle with me while I am trying to hold the shape of something that keeps changing.
Wade career ended after teammate incident. Steele cleared.
Eight years. My brother never said a word.
"Celeste." Jada's voice is low and careful.
"Do not." I set the phone face down on the counter. I walk to the back of the shop and stand at the supply cabinet with my hands flat on the shelf and I breathe. In through the nose. Out slow. The way Damon taught me when I was twelve and too angry to think straight, which is a thing I am not going to think about right now.
I hear Jada pick up the phone behind me.
"Stop reading it," I say.
"I stopped." A pause. "What do you want to do?"
I do not know. That is the honest answer and I cannot say it out loud because saying it makes it real, makes me someone standing in their dead father's shop with no money and no plan and a secret that has just become three secrets layered on top of each other.
I come back to the counter. I pick the phone up. I go to Damon's contact and I hold it there.
Jada watches me. She does not tell me to call. She does not tell me not to. She just waits, which is the right thing to do and I would tell her that if my throat was working properly.
I put the phone in my pocket. Not yet. Not until I know what I am going to say.
The bell above the door rings.
I look up.
He is standing there, same jacket, same easy posture, one hand still on the door like he has not fully committed to walking in. Like he is giving me the option to tell him to leave before he does.
Behind me I feel Jada go completely still.
"You have thirty seconds," I say.
He steps inside. He does not come all the way to the counter. He stops near the portfolios on the wall, a careful distance, and looks at me with that same steadiness he has had since the moment he walked in this morning, that complete refusal to flinch that I am starting to understand is not confidence but something older than confidence.
"You saw it," he says.
"My best friend found it in about forty-five seconds."
He nods, just slightly. Not surprised. Not performing regret. Just absorbing the fact like he already knew it was coming and prepared himself to stand inside it.
"You came back here to tell me?" I say. "You stood at my counter and said you know my brother and then you just left. You left me with that and walked away."
"I did not know how to stay."
"That is not an answer."
"No," he says. "It is not."
Jada moves behind me. A quiet shift of weight, letting me know she is there without inserting herself, and I am grateful for it even though I cannot say so.
I put both hands on the counter. I need something under them.
"Damon was twenty-two," I say. "He had just signed his second contract. Do you understand what that meant for our family? My father was sick. Damon was going to cover the medical costs. He was going to help us keep this shop." My voice is doing the thing I do not want it to do. I press harder on the counter. "And then his career was over and he never explained why and I spent two years watching my father hold that worry on top of everything else."
Rock does not look away. He does not offer an explanation to fill the silence. He just stands there and lets every word reach him, which is somehow worse than if he argued.
"Say something," I say.
"I cannot make it right by talking."
"Then why are you here?"
He takes one step closer to the counter. Just one. He stops there and looks at me and I notice, against my will, that he looks tired. Not the kind of tired that comes from today. The deeper kind. The kind that has been sitting in a person for years and stopped being visible because they stopped expecting it to go away.
"Because you deserve to hear it from me instead of a headline," he says. "What I did to your brother was real. It happened. I have no version of it that makes me the good person in the story."
I stare at him.
Jada makes a small sound behind me that is not quite a word.
I think about my father's face in the years after Damon came home early. The way he never asked questions out loud. The way he just made space at the table and kept working.
"You need to leave," I say. My voice is flat now. Flat is what I have left.
He holds for a second, then nods.
He turns for the door.
And I hear myself say: "How long have you known this shop was mine."
He stops. His back is to me.
"How long," I say again.
He turns around. Something in his expression shifts, just slightly, the very first crack in that steadiness.
"I found out after I filed," he says. "When I pulled the full ownership records."
"After you filed. But before you walked in here the first time."
He does not answer immediately, and in that pause every quiet thought I had about this man this morning, every moment where I found him easier to talk to than I wanted to, rearranges itself into something I do not have a name for yet.
"Yes," he says.
Jada steps up beside me.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and even without looking I already know it is not an email, not an alert, because the buzz pattern is different.
It is a call.
I pull it out.
Damon.