Chapter 56 WHAT'S NEXT

Chapter 56 WHAT'S NEXT

POV: Reese Calloway

Thursday morning Cole said he'd come if I wanted him there.

I was putting my jacket on at the door and he was at the kitchen table with his coffee and he said it the way he said things he'd already decided weren't going to change the outcome but wanted said anyway. Just the offer, sitting there.

"No," I said. "This one's mine."

He nodded. "I know. I just wanted to offer."

I looked at him at the kitchen table and something in my chest did the thing it did now with some regularity when he said something that was exactly the right thing without appearing to have calculated what the right thing was.

I smiled and went out the door.

The magazine's offices were on the fourteenth floor of a building on Michigan Avenue with the lake visible through the east windows if you stood at the right angle. The editor met me in the lobby and we took the elevator up and she talked about the documentary during the ride, specific sequences, specific images, the things that had stayed with her after the screening she'd attended the week of air date.

She'd been at the screening. I hadn't known that until she mentioned it in the elevator.

We sat across from each other in a corner office with the lake in the east window and she put a folder on the table between us and talked about what she was thinking. Regular editorial shoots. Her own column if I wanted it, my subjects, my framing. The kind of contract that meant the work had a home that wasn't contingent on any single project or any single person's decision about whether I was worth the risk.

Everything I'd had before Marcus. And built differently because I was different now and she understood that and had said so directly within the first five minutes of the meeting.

"We want to be the place where your work lives," she said. "If you want that."

I looked at the folder on the table between us.

Three years of real estate listings and corporate headshots and a camera I carried everywhere and pointed at nothing that mattered, and before that a career that had been going somewhere real until the machinery of someone else's ambition had run through it and left the wreckage behind.

"I need a week to think," I said.

"Take two," she said, without hesitation.

We shook hands and I took the elevator back down to the lobby and walked out into the Chicago afternoon.

The city was doing its Thursday afternoon thing, cold and bright, the kind of Chicago day that happened in the gap between seasons when the weather hadn't committed to anything yet. I walked back toward the parking structure with my bag on my shoulder and the folder the editor had given me under my arm and the contract language running in my head.

A red door on a building halfway down the block. The specific particular red of something recently repainted, catching the afternoon sun at an angle that made it look almost warm.

I stopped and raised the camera and took the shot.

A child's mitten on a bench outside a coffee shop. Small, green, sitting on the armrest with the fingers pointing up like it was waiting for something.

I took that one too.

On the L platform a man with a trumpet was playing something slow and unhurried, his case open on the platform floor in front of him, completely inside whatever he was playing and indifferent to the people moving around him in both directions.

I took three frames and kept the second one.

I sent all three to Dana before I reached the parking structure, standing on the pavement outside the entrance with the folder under my arm and the camera still in my hand.

Her reply came back while I was still standing there.

Are you going to say yes?

I looked at the three photographs on my screen. The red door, the green mitten, the trumpet player sealed inside his music on the platform.

Yes, I sent back.

The voice memo arrived thirty seconds later. Thirty seconds of Dana making sounds that weren't words, just pure unfiltered Dana happiness at a volume that was audible through the phone speaker even in a street with traffic. I listened to the whole thing standing on the pavement and then put my phone in my pocket and went to my car

Cole was on the front steps of my building when I turned onto my street.

Not in the car this time, not waiting at the curb with the engine running. Sitting on the steps with his phone in his hand, reading something, jacket on, completely still in the way he was still when he was somewhere he'd decided to be and wasn't managing the waiting.

He looked up when I reached the bottom of the steps.

His face was different from this morning. Something in it had shifted in the hours since I'd left him at the kitchen table with his coffee. Not the managed shift of someone deciding what to show. Something actual.

"What happened," I said.

He looked at me from the steps.

"The league suspended Hollis," he said. "Indefinitely, pending the full investigation outcome." He held his phone loosely in one hand. "The announcement came through an hour ago."

I stood at the bottom of the steps.

"And," he said. A beat. "I got offered my spot back on the team."