“Basketball is supposed to keep them out of pregnancy, too.” I gestured to the bleachers. “We have one teen mom out of sixteen in a school where almost half the girls have babies before they’re seniors, so it’s working for most of them. And we only have three gang members—that I know of—on the team. The South Side is the city’s dumping ground. It’s why the gym’s a wreck, half the girls don’t have uniforms, and we have to beg to get enough basketballs to run a decent drill. It’s going to take way more than basketball to keep these kids off drugs, out of childbirth, and in school.”

I turned away from Love and set the girls in one line to running into the basket and shooting from underneath, with the ones in the second line following to rebound. We practiced from inside the three-second lane, outside the three-point perimeter, hook shots, jump shots, layups. Halfway through the drill, Celine sauntered back into the gym. I didn’t talk to her about her ten minutes out of the room, just put her at the back of one of the lines.

“Your turn, Theresa,” I called.

She started toward the door, then muttered, “I think I can make it to the end of practice, Coach.”

“Don’t take any chances,” I said. “Better to miss another five minutes of practice than to risk embarrassment.”

She blushed again and insisted she was fine. I put her in the lane where Celine wasn’t and looked at Marcena Love, to see if she’d heard; the journalist turned her head and seemed intent on the play under the basket in front of her.

I smiled to myself: point to the South Side street fighter. Although street fighting wasn’t the most useful tool with Marcena Love: she had too much in her armory that went beyond me. Like the skinny—oh, all right, slim—muscular body her black Prada clung to. Or the fact that she’d known my lover since his Peace Corps days. And had been with Morrell last winter in Afghanistan. And had shown up at his Evanston condo three days ago, when I’d been in South Shore with Coach McFarlane.

When I’d reached his place that night myself, Marcena had been perched on the side of his bed, tawny head bent down as they looked at photographs together. Morrell was recovering from gunshot wounds that still required him to lie down much of the time, so it wasn’t surprising he was in bed. But the sight of a strange woman, and one with Marcena’s poise and ease, leaning over him—at ten o’clock—had caused hackles to rise from my crown to my toes.