Anne watched this spectacle unfold for two seconds before the elevator sealed shut again and she descended another level into the shadows of the parking garage.

November 13

[ NOVEMBER 13 ]

That same Friday marked Daniel Patrick Malone’s fifteenth birthday. And at precisely 6:57 a.m., just before dawn broke on the ides, Dan was dropped into the gloom of the Hockaday parking lot for swim practice.

The plans to build a pool on the Jesuit campus were slated for some time in the twenty-first century. Until then, practice was held at Hockaday, a girls’ prep and boarding school that was even more stuck-up and posh than Ursuline. The Jesuit swim team was thoroughly second-rate, but the Rangers were building it back, and Dan was one of the many good, but not great, sophomores looking to drop time, qualify for state, and letter.

But none of that mattered as everyone dawdled on deck, adjusting goggles, some stretching, most still snoozing. The Hockaday pool looked as frigid and as appealing as the North Atlantic. Dan cursed the calm, hyaline skin of the pool, then kicked Rick, who was passed out in his Ranger hoodie. Dan scanned the windows for any cute Hockaday girls going by, but goddamn, it was too early for this shit.

At 7:07, just as the swimmers began to hope that practice might be scratched, Coach Chris Moyle came careening through the glass double doors. He was the son of the original Coach Moyle, who was the Landry and Lombardi of Jesuit swimming, with several state titles notched on the wall of the Ranger locker room. And Chris suffered all the unfair expectations of a coach’s son, along with a severe case of who-gives-a-shit. Now, at thirty-three, with court dates for custody and alimony arrangements, the not-so-young Coach Moyle was nowhere near cutting it. For his day job, he was a “technician and inventory manager” for Dolphin Pool Supply but also bartended at the Fridays off Stemmons, which often turned into long nights chasing tail across West Dallas.

“Everyone in the water by the top of the clock.” Coach Moyle steadied himself as he slapped the surface with a lane line. “Let’s go. We are what we repeatedly do.”

Even when sweating one out, Moyle was the Trevi Fountain of coaching aphorisms—ranging from the thoughtful (“If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you”) to the cryptic and quasi-Zen (“Don’t wait for it, swim for it”) to the tautological and banal (“Float, don’t sink,” “This is a lesson in the competition of life”).

“Last one in can warm up with four hundred fly. Let’s go, gentlemen. The later we start, the more pain I put on it.”