Page 89 of The Longest Shot
Which means…
Which means I didn’t run from a predator.
I ran from a partner.
A deeply flawed, chronically terrified partner who handles emotional intimacy like a rookie handles their first playoff game, but a partner nonetheless. Someone who was trying, in his catastrophically incompetent way, to help fix what he thought was broken.
To be the hero I never requested because he doesn’t know how to just… exist.
The sunrise creeps across the campus, painting everything in shades of warmth that feel obscene against the wreckage of my body and mind and emotional state. My sweat is cooling now, every muscle aching with that deep, bone-level exhaustion that comes from trying to outrun something inevitable.
But nothing hurts as much as the realization that my fortress—my perfect, impenetrable fortress—isn’t protecting me.
It’s suffocating me.
All those walls I built after my high school betrayal and James’s dismissal, all that carefully maintained distance… they didn’t keep me safe. They kept me isolated. They turned every gesture of kindness into a threat assessment, and every moment of vulnerability into a tactical error.
The stone bench is warming slightly under my body heat, but I can’t move. Can’t process next steps. Because if my entire approach to the world… tolife… is corrupted—if trust isn’tactually an error but a calculated risk—then what thefuckdo I do now?
The answer sits in my chest like a stone, heavy and undeniable.
Complete system rebuild.
Every firewall.
Every defensive protocol.
Every carefully constructed barrier between me and the world.
I have to stand in the wreckage and figure out who Morgan Riley is when she’s not the “Morgue.” And maybe I have to consider the possibility that James Fitzgerald, human disaster and accidental destroyer, might be worth the risk of something real.
The thought is terrifying, but I sit with it, on the cold bench as the sun rises over Pine Barren. My fortress is ruins around me, and for the first time in three years, I let myself feel exactly how exhausted I am of running solo, keeping everyone and everything at a distance.
Turns out not wanting to be hurt ends up hurting just as much.
thirty-three
ROOK
The walkto Coach Pearson’s office stretches ahead of me. There's no frantic energy left in my limbs, no performance brewing in my chest. It's just the death march from a guy whose entire identity detonated in front of three hundred witnesses yesterday.
Inside his office, through the frosted glass, I can see two silhouettes. One I'd recognize anywhere as Coach—broad shoulders, the patient posture of a man who’s survived thirty years of hockey players doing spectacularly stupid things—and the other is sharp-angled, sitting rigid like a praying mantis waiting to strike.
Galloway.
Of course.
I knock twice.
“Come in.” Coach’s voice carries the tone that says he vouched for me to the administration, and I thanked him by setting myself on fire in public.
I open the door. As predicted, Galloway sits in the chair across from Coach’s desk, his eyes practically glowing with satisfaction. His PBU championship ring—class of ninety-two, a fact he mentions more often than vegans mention being vegan—catches the fluorescent light as he twists it around his sausage finger.
Coach Pearson sits behind his desk, arms crossed, looking every one of his fifty-eight years plus interest. The lines around his eyes seem deeper, excavated by meetings exactly like this one. And suddenly, it strikes me that being the 'team-dad' sort of coach rather than the 'shouter-in-chief' hurts more in these moments.
“Fitzgerald,” Galloway says.
“Sit,” Coach says.
