The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(41)

It was a good night to end a good football weekend. I felt as relaxed and happy as I’d been since the reading of the will. This was, I thought, the way I’d hoped things would be before my older brothers had started throwing bombs at me.

Nearly midnight by now.

Thomas’s phone was in front of him on the table and pinged with an incoming message. He picked it up and frowned as he stared at the screen, for much too long a time.

“Sonofabitch,” he said.

Still staring at the phone in his hand.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

There wasn’t anything about the look on his face, and his sudden lack of color, that I liked.

“Tell me you’re not looking at the Tribune website.”

“Worse than that,” he said.

“What can be worse than what they’ve been doing to us?”

“TMZ,” Thomas said.





Forty-Eight



TMZ HAD TIME-STAMPED video footage of Ryan Morrissey showing up at my house at 11:08 the night Danny had threatened him with those sworn statements.

And it had time-stamped video, every hour on the hour, of Ryan’s car staying right where it was until he walked out my front door the next morning while I waved to him from the front porch, as if I were sending a hubby off to work.

Or a boyfriend.

See you in the next news cycle, Danny had said.

Death by news cycle.

Of course I wasn’t spared by the San Francisco Tribune’s front-page headline.





COACHES WITH BENEFITS




Underneath was the photograph, courtesy of TMZ, of Ryan and me.

“I’m telling you—this isn’t that big a deal,” I said to Thomas in my office the next morning.

The satellite trucks had been back in front of my house. There was more media waiting for me when I got to Wolves Stadium. I’d shut off my phone by then, and when I got upstairs I told my assistant, Andy Chen, to hold my calls until the end of days.

I was at my desk. Thomas was behind me, staring down at the field.

“It’s a big deal,” Thomas said wearily.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Jeanie Buss was engaged to Phil Jackson when he was winning championships coaching the Lakers. Even I know that, and I don’t follow pro basketball all that closely.”

“She wasn’t running the team then,” Thomas said.

“What difference does that make? Her family still owned the damn team.”

“But she wasn’t the big boss lady,” Thomas said. “And she didn’t fire one coach so she could hire her boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend!”

“You know that. And I know that. But the world thinks that you fired the previous coach and gave the job to the guy you are now having sleepovers with.”

Rich Kopka, the coach I had fired, had already weighed in about that, and about TMZ.

“I didn’t know that if I’d given her a little sugar,” Kopka told Seth Dowd, “I could have kept my job.”

Thomas kept staring down at the empty field, coffee mug in his hands.

“In the end,” I said, “Danny managed to clip Ryan anyway. And me.”

I slapped my desk hard, nearly spilling coffee out of my own mug.

“Seriously? Are people dumb enough to think Ryan screwed his way into his job?”

“You want the short answer?” Thomas said. “Yes. Same game plan they were going to use against Ryan with those women. He’s the one who’s totally screwed once the accusation is out there. How it works these days.”

I angled my chair and took a closer look at Thomas. He looked the way Ryan had looked that morning at the house. As if he’d slept in his clothes.

I drank coffee that I wished had something stronger in it. It was the way my father used to drink it. I thought about reaching down for the bottle of Irish whiskey I’d taken out of the bottom drawer of his desk and put into mine.

“Somebody set Ryan up,” I said.

“Or had your house staked out without your noticing it,” Thomas said. “And guess what? It doesn’t matter. They wanted you both to look bad, and now you do.”

“Come on. Is it really worse than everything else they’ve hit me with?”

“Yeah, Sis, it is. You know why? Because it’s one more thing. I kept hoping we could get to the league meetings without one more thing. But now this.”

He turned and sat down on the windowsill.

“They’re never going to stop.”

“Well established,” I said. “But so is something else: I’m not quitting.” I managed a small smile. First of the day. “If we do, the terrorists win.”

We kicked around some ideas about how to respond—if we even did respond. I wasn’t on any social media platform. No Facebook. No Instagram. No Twitter. No TikTok. Somehow I’d managed to live my life to this point—even the life I’d now been thrown into—resisting the notion that having an unspoken thought was against the law.

Thomas, however, was all over social media, almost like it was his new drug of choice. He even had a presence on some platforms that I hadn’t previously known existed.

We finally decided to simply issue a statement on the Wolves’ official Twitter account denying that Ryan Morrissey and I were involved in a romantic relationship.