Rhiannon thought about the ten million texts she probably already had waiting for her response and took a drink out of her wine bottle. “Do me a favor and send me the text in a week?”
Jia nodded. “Yes. Got it. Will do. Gosh, I can’t believe I came out here to thank you for taking that Peter guy down and now we’ll be seeing each other in California—”
An odd choice of words. Rhiannon stopped her. “I haven’t taken anyone down.”
“Yeah, you did,” Jia said slowly. “He quit. Didn’t you hear?”
Her heart lurched. Rhiannon placed the bottle of wine on the bench with a clink. “No. I’m on vacation. I don’t have a phone. What happened?”
“It broke like an hour ago.”
“Gimme your phone.” She made a beckoning motion and Jia stuck her hand in her pocket again.
The girl had well-hidden pockets on her skirt. Rhiannon liked her more and more.
Jia unlocked her phone, scrolled through, and handed it to her. Rhi absorbed the backlit screen like a junkie inhaling a fix. There it was, in black and white.
She didn’t know what expression was on her face, but Jia drifted closer and sat next to her on the bench, placing her hand on Rhiannon’s shoulder. “More people came forward after you. Peter stepped down as CEO at Swype.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
SAMSON ZIPPED up his suitcase and glanced around the otherwise empty bedroom of his borrowed high-rise apartment.
“Too bad you have to leave here,” Dean remarked. He lounged in the doorway. It was odd to see him without Miley, but since they’d last had lunch, it seemed Dean really was making more of a conscious effort to not have his life be completely consumed by his child. Miley was home with Josie’s mother.
“Campaign’s over and so’s my gig. I don’t want Matchmaker to spend more money than I brought in.”
“I’m glad you’re staying in L.A., though. It’ll be nice to see you more.”
“I’m glad too.” Over the last twenty-four hours, he’d made a couple of big decisions. The Cayucos home could wait. He’d found a nice place to lease, a few blocks away. It wasn’t as ritzy, but it had a parking space and an in-unit washer/dryer, so what more could he really ask for? “Aunt Belle will be here in town as well for the next few months, what with William stepping down. She’s going to fight you to pamper Miley.”
“Miley could always use more aunts. She going to try her hand at actively running the whole enchilada?”
“No. She’s got an interim head right now. At some point she’ll sell, but she wants to find the right person.” Rhiannon had been the right person, but she wasn’t interested.
He glanced at his phone, sitting silent on the nightstand. He would not check it for the tenth time in the last hour to make sure it was functioning and on. It would ring, Rhiannon calling or texting him back, or it wouldn’t. He’d been trying to contact her for a full day now, since Helena’s show had aired.
His heart ached for her, and he wanted nothing more than to hug her. Yes, people would be supportive, but others wouldn’t. If she’d let him, he’d use his own big body to block the hate as much as he could, but no one would be able to shield her from all of it.
That if was a pretty big if. Whatever anger he’d felt toward her had well and truly dissolved, and he’d tried to make it clear he held no hard feelings in the messages he’d sent her, but who knew where her head was.
Dean sat on the bed. “I got a new gig lined up.”
“No kidding.” Samson placed the suitcase on the floor, against the wall. “What is it?”
“I’m, uh, working with Trevor.”
Samson jerked around. “What?”
“It’s a good organization.”
“Is that why you’re here? Am I your first assignment?”
Dean followed Samson out to the living room. “I like to see your smiling face, too, but sort of.”
“Did you and Aunt Belle talk about this?”
“We talked, but I decided to come to you on my own. Look, I want to show you something. Can I?” He gestured to the table.
Samson gave him an annoyed look, but he sat. Dean set up the tablet he’d brought with him in front of Samson. The screen was open to a paused video. “This was from last season. Watch.” He pressed play.
Samson crossed his arms over his chest. He didn’t follow football much anymore, but he recognized the kid the journalist was interviewing. Al Anoa’i, a rising star who’d been drafted by the Bisons a couple years ago.
The player was sticky with sweat, his long curly hair clinging to his face. The reporter gestured to Al’s arm. “I noticed you had something written there today during the game, what’s that?”
“Oh, yeah.” He turned his arm to face the camera. “It says LIMA. We all know about Big Joe being sick, and I wanted to show my solidarity with him and his family today.”
The reporter nodded. “Big Joe, of course, a beloved former Bisons player. Why today?”
“It’s the anniversary of the Charm walking off the field.”
At that, Samson flinched, flummoxed. Dean squeezed his shoulder. “Keep watching.”
Al continued. “Like, it was always powerful for me, as a kid, to see other Samoans in this sport that I loved, other guys who looked like me, but when Samson Lima took a stand and straight-up quit because his teammate wasn’t getting the right care? I mean, that was some formative stuff. I’ll remember that until I die.”
The reporter spoke into his mic. “Does it worry you now, playing this game? Knowing as much as we do about head injuries?”
The twentysomething-year-old screwed up his face, the sun reflecting off his sweaty brown skin. “I mean, kind of? But I love it. And I think that’s okay, you can love something and know there are problems with it. Times have changed since Samson walked off that field, and I hope the league continues to work with researchers to make our game safer so we can do what we love.”
Dean hit pause. Samson looked at his friend. “Why’d you show me this?”
“To show you what you’ve done, and to give you an idea of what you could do. Like, don’t google yourself regularly, but you might want to do it once every five years or so, enough to know that kids consider you a hero.”
Samson ran his hands through his hair. “I didn’t intend to be—”
“See, that’s the funny thing. Sometimes you don’t intend to do something, and you do it, and no one gives a fuck what you intended because you’ve done the thing.”
There’s no intent in ghosting.
“You wouldn’t let them put me back in the game, because I was your brother, and I needed your help,” Dean murmured. “Right?”
Samson nodded. Dean tapped the tablet. “You have more brothers out there, Samson. Whether you like it or not, you’re their hero. So you can sit there and talk about how you didn’t ask to be a hero, or you can simply go be the thing we all know you are.”
You made your industry better for the young men who came after you, and the older men who came before you, and you did it just by living your life.