Two Different worlds
By twenty-three, Dylan Carter had become several different versions of himself.
There was the version that eighty thousand people knew.
Number 9.
Captain.
The face of the New York Vanguards.
The boy wonder who had signed a four-hundred-million-dollar contract before he was old enough to legally drink in some states.
The man with endorsement deals, magazine covers and documentaries that used words like phenomenon and generational talent.
Then there was the version his teammates knew.
The first person to arrive at training.
The last person to leave.
The man who remembered birthdays.
The man who secretly paid hospital bills for academy players’ parents and somehow made sure nobody ever
found out.
The man who would fight for his team with his whole chest and then disappear into silence the moment the cameras
turned off.
Then there was the version almost nobody knew.
The one that existed in quiet rooms.
The one that hated interviews.
The one that slept badly after losses.
The one that sometimes sat alone in his apartment at two in the morning wondering what exactly remained when football eventually stopped loving him back.
Dylan Carter protected that version carefully.
Public life had taught him that the world loved access.
Access became entitlement.
Entitlement became ownership.
Ownership became loneliness.
So he kept his boundaries sharp.
His privacy sharper.
No scandals.
No public relationships.
No interviews that weren’t necessary.
No pretending.
Especially not pretending.
Because if Dylan Carter had one rule, it was simple: He would never perform being okay for strangers.
Not anymore.
At twenty-one years old, Sarie Macksons was preparing to disappear.
Not literally.
Professionally.
The resignation letter sat unfinished on her laptop while Manhattan traffic blinked outside her apartment window.
Three years earlier she had walked into Brightline Media believing journalism was the closest thing to changing the
world.
Three years later she had discovered that journalism and content were not always the same thing.
She could write.
Really write.
Stories people remembered.
Questions that made people uncomfortable in useful ways.
Questions that made people tell the truth by accident.
Unfortunately, the internet preferred celebrity divorces and billionaire diets.
Her dream had never been magazines anyway.
Her dream had always been books.
Books with dog-eared pages.
Books people underlined.
Books people carried through airports and heartbreaks and rainy Tuesdays.
Books that stayed.
So she was leaving.
She just hadn’t told anyone yet.
Sarie Macksons had spent her entire life being underestimated.
She was funny when she was nervous.
Bold when she was scared.
Stubborn when she cared.
She possessed the remarkable ability to say incredibly brave things and then spend six business days replaying them in her head afterwards.
She had a face people remembered and a personality that tried very hard to make sure they remembered the conversation instead.
She wore simplicity like armour.
Unfortunately for her, beauty had a habit of ignoring permission.
There was one other thing almost nobody knew.
Sarie was Nigerian.
Not secretively.
Not shamefully.
Simply privately.
Her books would carry her words.
Not her nationality.
Not because she wanted to hide where she came from.
Because she wanted the work to arrive in the room before the assumptions did.
For twenty-one years that had worked perfectly.
Then Dylan Carter happened.
And suddenly privacy became a negotiation.
If someone had told either of them that morning that they were about to become one of the biggest complications in each other’s lives— they would both have laughed.
Dylan had football.
Sarie had books.
There was an entire universe between those two things.
Unfortunately, life had never shown much respect for universes.
