Page 68 of ClickBack

“I’m calling Von tonight.”

“Call me after. Even if you don’t have an answer.”

“I’m not waiting on his permission.”

“I didn’t say you were.” Cam closes the folder. “I need to know what I can say when people call me. ‘He’s thinking’ only improves with age to a point.”

I look through the window at the city. This morning it was somewhere to fly into, sit through a meeting, and leave. Now I am trying to imagine grocery shopping here. Driving home after a loss. Being the man the coach described even on a night when none of it works.

“Nine years is a long time,” I say.

Cam follows my glance. “Yes, it is.”

He doesn’t tell me I can build a life anywhere. He remembers the apartment I had when I first got to Philadelphia, how often I went home to Mom because I had finished practice and had no idea what else to do with myself. I know how to live alone now. I would still be starting over somewhere.

The waiter arrives. Cam orders, then waits while I decide. For the rest of lunch, he tells me about an argument at his office over a chair nobody wants until somebody else sits in it. It is the first problem he has put in front of me all day that I do not have to solve.

I fly home that evening and drive back from the airport with Toronto’s offense running through my head. At a light, I realize I have missed the turn I use for my building. I go around the block, irritated at myself for making a city I know feel unfamiliar before anybody has asked me to leave it.

Upstairs, I change out of the clothes I wore to the meeting and send Giselle a message that I’m home. Then I call Von like I said I would.

He answers with the camera pointed at a ceiling.

“You call to inspect the house?” he asks.

“I called to talk to you. Where’s your face?”

“Give me a second.”

The picture moves past a lamp and one bare foot before he appears. He pushes a hand through his curls and settles onto the couch.

“There. Better?”

“You could hold it farther away.”

“You want me in the room with you or not?”

I laugh and sit at the kitchen counter.

“How’d Toronto look?” he asks.

“Good.”

“Coach?”

“Prepared. Knew what he wanted to do with me.”

“Minutes?”

“Real ones.”

“Sounds terrible.”

“Apparently.”

He smiles, but it doesn’t last. He knows why I called. I can see him deciding whether to let me get there myself.

“Cam’s still talking to San Antonio,” I say.