“Fuck me,” he says as he ends a call and starts tapping on the screen. “Those geezer-pill pushers are playing hardball.”

“Is he a baseball player, your client?” she asks him. They’re working on range of motion again today, Herb’s heel cupped in her palm.

Herb looks up from the tiny screen, brows knit together. “Is he a what?”

“You said something about ‘left hander.’ That’s baseball, right?”

“Yes, that’s baseball.”

“Is that your favorite sport?”

“Dear, it doesn’t matter if it’s my favorite sport or if it feels like oral surgery—or like what you’re doing to my foot right now, for that matter. An agent’s commission is capped at three percent in football. Basketball, too. Why the fuck would I get involved for three percent?”

She stares at him blankly.

“Exactly.” He looks down, pecks at the phone’s screen for another minute, and slides the puck into his shirt pocket with a smug smile. “Now Hal and this Centrum deal, for instance. My cut’s two hundred.”

“Mm-hmm.” Sara flexes his foot then points his toe. Flex and point.

“Thousand.”

“Oh.” His foot is suddenly very heavy in her hand. The number, two hundred thousand, is impossible to her, and she tries to click through what such an amount could mean: Her long-ago student loans, gone in a flash. Rent for twenty-five years. Her mom’s surgery, paid five times over. A mound of coke, as big as Camelback Mountain, Davis sliding down it, his gleeful, little-boy grin. No, she shakes the image from her head. Not that.

Sara is drinking coffee in her apartment when her phone rings, a Southern California number she doesn’t recognize. She considers whether she should pick it up. It could be Davis, but she can’t figure why he’d be calling from California. After three rings, she answers.

“This is Sara,” she says.

“Sara, Herb Allison here.”

Her mind clicks through faces and names until it lands on the right combination: Broken leg, little dog. The giant wheelchair. It does stairs! Two hundred thousand. Handsome, in an old-guy way. “Good morning, Mr. Allison.”

“Bad news, kid.” No one’s called her “kid” in years. She’s nearly thirty, and if she’s being honest with herself, her lifestyle since moving to Phoenix hasn’t done her any favors. Most mornings, like today, she feels old. “Marlene is leaving me.”

“Oh … I’m sorry.” The line is quiet. “But I thought you were already, uh, divorced?”

“We were. I mean, we are. But she’s going back to L.A. You understand?”

“Sure,” Sara says, though she doesn’t.