Chapter One: The Ball Doesn’t Care
The court light came on at 4:47 a.m. Adrian Voss had figured out, months ago, that the automatic timer at the Rosewood Athletic Club could be tricked if you swiped the maintenance card twice, fast, almost like a heartbeat.
He was seventeen and alone. He liked mornings that way. Alone meant nobody watched him miss.
He missed the first serve. It clipped the tape and dribbled sideways like it was apologizing. He missed the second one too, long by a foot, and stood in the orange sodium light bouncing a third ball against his strings, counting under his breath the way some people counted sheep.
Twenty-three. Twenty-four.
His father’s voice showed up uninvited, dry and even, the way it always did. The ball doesn’t care how you feel about it, Adrian. It only cares where you send it.
Nathaniel Voss had said that to him first when Adrian was seven, standing behind a chain-link fence in a coat that had no business being at a children’s tennis clinic. He’d said some version of it maybe four hundred times since. It was the closest thing to a bedtime story his father had ever offered him.
He served again. It landed an inch inside the line and something in his chest loosened by exactly that much.
By the time the sun came up over the fence, he’d hit two hundred serves and eaten nothing, and his hands had that raw, singing feeling that meant tomorrow they’d hurt in the specific way that meant progress. He liked that feeling. He’d built most of his life around chasing it, without ever really stopping to ask why, or what it would cost him to keep it up.
He packed his bag, wiped down his racket, and jogged home before his father woke up, because some mornings it was easier to already have an answer ready than to explain, again, why he needed to be somewhere before the sun did.
