Chapter 2 BOUNDARIES

I spend the afternoon building a fence.

Not a literal one. A document. Two pages, bulleted, titled Working Terms, and by 3:50 I have read it so many times that the words have gone smooth. Through the glass wall of my office, the floor hums with its usual four o'clock panic, associates pretending to type, an intern pretending not to watch the elevator.

They know who is coming. Everybody knows who is coming.

Liam Knox arrives at 3:58, two minutes early, and the entire floor forgets how to pretend.

He doesn't walk so much as occupy. Team-issue hoodie, a ball cap in one fist, a strip of white tape across the knuckles of his right hand and a half-healed cut over his left eyebrow that someone stitched in a hurry. He smells, even from the doorway, like cold rink and cheap soap. Eleven years have turned the angry boy I remember into something larger and quieter, and I find that I resent the quiet more.

He knocks on the open door, after he is already through it.

"Knox," I say.

"DuBois." His gaze travels the office once, the glass, the orchids, the framed pitch awards I don't actually like, and lands on me. "Or is it Ms. now? Miss? Manager?"

"Ms. DuBois, in meetings. In this office. In front of anyone." I gesture to the chair opposite my desk. "Sit."

He does. I note that. He doesn't slouch, doesn't spread. He sits like a man who has been called to a principal's office more times than he'd like and has decided to be early to this one.

"Manager it is," he says, and something at the corner of his mouth lifts.

"That isn't what I said."

"It's what I heard."

I let it go, which is a mistake, and I know it, and I slide the Working Terms across the desk anyway.

"Read it."

He reads. His lips don't move, but his eyes do, quick and thorough, and I realize with irritation that he is reading it the way I read a contract: for the trap. When he finishes, he sets it down and squares it to the desk edge.

"Rule one," he says. "I don't come into your office unless I'm invited."

"You were invited today."

"Rule two. No coffee in here. Rule three, I don't comment on your shoes." One eyebrow, the uncut one, rises. "Is that a joke, or are you serious?"

"I am extremely serious about the shoes."

"Rule seven." He taps the paper. "'The client will not touch the manager's desk, belongings, or person without explicit invitation.'"

"That's not up for debate."

"I wasn't going to debate it." His voice stays level. There is no leer in it, no performance. "I'm going to ask what happened that you needed to write it down."

The question is so direct it takes a second to land. Nothing happened. Not to me, not lately. Only twenty-eight years of men who assume the access.

"It is standard language," I say.

"It isn't in the last three client agreements I signed."

"Then those agreements were deficient." I fold my hands. "You will keep your hands to yourself, Mr. Knox. I'll hold the same standard. Handshake only if I offer it. Do we understand each other?"

He considers me for a moment.

"Understood," he says. "No touching without an invitation. Written down and signed, if you want."

It's a clean answer. I haven't earned a clean answer. I move on before it can make me soft.

"Your schedule starts tomorrow. Media training at seven. Hospital reading on Tuesdays. Sponsor lunches. You will be on time, dressed correctly, and polite to every person who speaks to you."

"Polite."

"Pleasant is the minimum. Polite is the goal." I open the file. "You have two suspensions in twenty-four months. You have a third strike clause in your standard player contract, and Apex's CEO has given us ninety days to prove that a third will never come."

"I know the terms."

"Then you know that if you hit anyone, anywhere, for any reason, you lose the deal, and I lose a great deal more than that."

His jaw works. "I don't hit people for fun."

"I know why you hit them." It comes out before I've decided to say it. "That is exactly the problem. The league doesn't give points for noble reasons."

For a moment neither of us speaks. Somewhere on the floor, a phone rings and rings.

I turn a page to give my hands something to do. The page is his financial summary, and I keep reading rather than look up.

"Your family," I say. "The house in the suburbs. Mortgage, repairs, your sister's school costs. A third of every paycheck goes home, and your account hasn't missed a month in four years."

The chair doesn't creak. Nothing in him moves at all, which tells me more than if he'd stood up.

"That wasn't in the brief."

"It's in your bank statements. I read every file I'm responsible for."

"Responsible." He says it flatly. "That's what he calls it, your father. A responsible party."

"My father calls it a lot of things." I close the folder. "I call it a deal. You need Apex, and I need ninety days. Neither of us has to like the arrangement."

"Do you like it?"

"I like results."

He stands. He doesn't loom, which I notice, and he stops a full step back from the desk, which I notice more. At the door, with the ball cap in his hand, he turns.

"At Hawthorne," he says, "you testified at my hearing."

My stomach does something unprofessional. "I answered the dean's questions truthfully."

"You answered them quickly." No heat in it, only the flat sorrow of a very old fact. "I missed the state final."

"I know."

"I know you know." He settles the cap on his head. "Why'd you pitch me, DuBois? Your father would've given you Pierce, a nice easy win. You picked the one guy who hates you."

The honest answer is that Pierce doesn't need me. Pierce has never needed anyone. I have spent my whole life being useful to people who didn't need me, and I wanted, once, to be useful to someone who did.

I say none of that.

"Because you were the best player I'd ever seen," I tell him, in my most professional voice. "Seven a.m., Knox. Don't be late."

He lets himself out and closes the door behind him with exactly the force of a man who has read the rules.

It's only after he's gone that I notice the Working Terms is still on my desk, squared to the edge, and that in the margin beside rule seven, in blunt, slanting pencil, he has written two words.

Fair enough.