Everyone raised their glasses. Angie crossed her arms.
‘First I must say that we are very pleased that Marcus’s problems have been dealt with.’ He smiled at Marcus. Marcus smiled back. LaDonna looked at Angie and rolled her eyes. ‘But today is a celebration of our new collaboration between One-Ten, our international partners, and some of the greatest athletes the world has ever known.’
He kept talking, but Angie wasn’t interested. She glanced around the room. Harding was drinking champagne because he wasn’t yellow enough already. Laslo was slinking in the corner. Kip was playing with his ball. Two more of the bigger stars had arrived. They stood in the back, towering over the mortals in the room, their gorgeous wives at their sides.
That was when Angie saw them.
Reuben and Jo Figaroa. Fig was not the biggest star, but he was the only one that Angie was interested in. At six feet eight, he was easy to pick out of the crowd. His wife was harder to find, mostly because she worked to stay in the shadows. Jo was petite compared to most of the players’ wives. She was built like a ballerina. Not Misty Copeland, but the old-school ballerinas who were such wispy waifs that they could turn sideways and disappear.
That was obviously what Jo was trying to do now. She stood beside her husband, not touching him, her body turned at an angle as she looked down at the floor.
Angie took the rare opportunity to study the girl. Her curly brown hair. Her perfect features. Her graceful neck and elegant shoulders. She had poise. That was what made you notice her. Jo was trying to disappear, but she didn’t understand that she was the sort of woman you couldn’t take your eyes off of.
‘Jesus, Polaski.’ Harding elbowed Angie in the ribs. ‘Why don’t you ask for her number?’
Angie felt her cheeks go hot.
‘Sick bitch.’ He elbowed her again. ‘She’s a little younger than your usual.’
‘Fuck off.’ Angie stalked across the room to get away from him. She could still hear him chuckling his old pervert laugh even with fifty people between them.
She leaned against the wall. She watched Ditmar finish his toast. He did that German thing where he had to look everybody in the eye. He did it with Marcus. He did it with LaDonna. He did it with Reuben Figaroa. He could not do it with Jo. She was staring down into her champagne flute, not drinking. Her hand was at her neck, fingers playing with a simple gold chain. There was something tragic about her beauty that broke Angie’s heart.
Maybe Dale Harding wanted to fuck his daughter.
Angie just wanted to make sure that hers was okay.
MONDAY, 8:00 PM
Angie sat alone on the giant couch in Kip’s office. The lights were off. The party upstairs was winding down as people headed off to dinner. Her shoes were on the floor. A glass of Scotch was in her hand. She could hear the steady hum of traffic snaking down Peachtree. Monday night. People still wanted to go out. There were clubs, shopping malls, restaurants. The rich and famous looking to see and be seen.
110 Sports Management was located in the center of Buckhead. Half a mile north, you could find one of the most expensive zip Codes in the country. Sprawling mansions with guest houses and Olympic-size swimming pools. Private security. Heavy iron gates. Mega-star athletes. Rap stars. Music people. Drug lords living beside hedge fund managers and cardiologists.
Since the seventies, Atlanta had been a mecca for middle-class African Americans. Doctors and lawyers from the historically black colleges graduated and decided to stick around. A lot of professional athletes from other towns kept homes in the city. They wanted their kids to go to private schools that understood that the only color that mattered was green. That was the great thing about Atlanta. You could do anything you wanted so long as you had the money.
Angie had a lot of money now, at least relative to what she usually kept in her bank account. There were the checks she got from Kip every two weeks, and the pocket change she made off the girls.
None of it made her happy.
For as long as she could remember, Angie had only ever looked at the future. Nothing could be done about the past, and more often than not, the present was too shitty to contemplate. Trapped with her mother’s pimp? Temporary. Shuttled to another foster home? Just for now. Living in the back of her car? Not for long. Time is what kept her moving forward. Next week, next month, next year. All she had to do was keep running, keep looking ahead, and eventually she’d turn that corner.
Only now that she’d turned the corner, she found that there was nothing there.
What did normal women want that Angie didn’t already have?
A home. A husband. A daughter.
Like everything else, she already had a daughter that she had thrown away. Josephine Figaroa was twenty-seven years old. Like Angie, she could pass for white or black or Latina, or even Middle Eastern, if she wanted to freak out people on an airplane. She was thin. Too thin, but maybe that came with the territory. The other wives on the team were always cleansing or dieting or going to spinning classes or plastic surgeons to get things sucked and filled and pinned back up so they could compete with the groupies who swarmed their husbands. They need not have bothered. Their husbands were not attracted to the groupies because they were hotter than their wives. They were attracted to them because they were groupies.
It was a hell of a lot more fun to be with somebody who thought you were perfect than it was to be with a woman who wouldn’t put up with your shit.
Angie didn’t know what kind of wife Jo was. Only twice had she been in the same room with her daughter, both times at the 110 offices, both times from a distance, because both times Reuben had been there. He towered over his wife, radiating a quiet confidence. Jo seemed to like this. She leaned into his shadow. She kept her eyes down, demure, almost transparent. The best word that came to mind was obedient, which pissed Angie off, because this girl had her blood and that blood had never taken orders from anybody.
Kate.
That’s what Angie had thought she would call her daughter. Like Katharine Hepburn. Like a woman who knew how to hold herself. Like a woman who took what she wanted.
What did Jo want? Judging by her demeanor, it seemed like she wished for nothing more than what she already had. A rich husband. A child. An easy life. The painful truth was that Jo was ordinary. She had attended a small high school outside of Griffin, Georgia. She had been smart enough to get into the University of Georgia, but not smart enough to graduate. Angie wanted to believe Jo had dropped out because she was a free spirit, but the math didn’t support it. She had left school for a man. Eight years ago, she had married Reuben Figaroa. He was two years her senior and already in the NBA. His reputation was that of a laser-focused player. Off the court, he was often described as reserved, cerebral. He wasn’t into flash. He was about doing the job right and going home to his family. Apparently this was what Jo wanted. She’d followed him to Los Angeles and to Chicago and now she had returned with him back to her home state. They had one kid, a boy, six years old, named Anthony.
This was where the publicly accessible information on Jo Figaroa ended. Despite her age, Jo wasn’t on social media. She wasn’t a joiner. There were no groups with which she was involved. She didn’t go to parties unless they were for her husband’s work. She didn’t meld with the wives. She didn’t lunch. She didn’t wander around the mall or hang out at the gym. The only way Angie was able to track her at all was through her husband.