“Do you really believe that?”
“You don’t?”
Myron said nothing.
“And the parents see it too. Their kids are happier here. They won’t burn out as fast, but the better players are leaving for the intense boot camps.”
“That’s short-term thinking,” Myron said.
“Maybe. But if they burn out when they’re twenty-five, well, that’s late in a career anyway. They need to win now. We get that, don’t we, Myron? We were both blessed athletically, but if you don’t have that killer instinct—the part of you that makes you a great competitor if not a great human being—it is hard to be an elite.”
“So are you saying we were like that?” Myron asked.
“No, I had my mom.”
“And me?”
Suzze smiled. “I remember seeing you play at Duke in the NCAA finals. The expression on your face . . . you’d rather die than lose.”
For a moment neither of them spoke. Myron stared at tennis trophies, the shiny trinkets that represented Suzze’s success. Finally Suzze said, “Did you really see Kitty last night?”
“Yes.”
“How about your brother?”
Myron shook his head. “Brad may have been there, but I didn’t see him.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Myron shifted in his seat. “You think Kitty posted that ‘Not His’?”
“I’m raising the possibility.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions yet. You said you had something you wanted to show me. About Kitty.”
“Right.” She started gnawing on her lip, something Myron hadn’t seen her do in years. He waited, gave her a little time and space. “So yesterday after we talked, I started checking around.”
“Checking around for what?”
“I don’t know, Myron,” she said, a little impatience sneaking in. “Something, a clue, whatever.”
“Okay.”
Suzze started typing on her computer. “So I started looking at my own Facebook page, where that lie was posted. You know anything about how people fan you?”
“I assume they just sign up.”
“Right. So I decided to sort of do what you suggested. I started looking for old boyfriends or tennis rivals or fired musicians—someone who might want to harm us.”
“And?”
Suzze was still typing. “And I started going through the people who’d signed up recently for the fan page. I mean, I now have forty-five thousand followers. So it took some time. But eventually . . .”
She clicked the mouse and waited. “Okay, here. I stumbled across this profile from someone who signed up three weeks ago. I thought it was pretty odd, especially in light of what you told me about last night.”
She gestured toward Myron, who stood and circled around to see what was on the screen. When he saw the name in bold on the top of the profile page, he wasn’t really all that surprised.
Kitty Hammer Bolitar.
8
Kitty Hammer Bolitar.
Back in the privacy of his office, Myron took a closer look at the Facebook page. No question about it when he saw the profile photo: It was his sister-in-law. Older, sure. A little more weathered. The cuteness from her tennis days had hardened a bit, but her face still had that perky-pretty thing going on. He stared at her for a moment and tried to quell the hatred that naturally rose to the surface whenever he thought of her.