No Pads, No Promises

I have written approximately forty thousand words about Graham Sutter and maybe six of them were kind. Now the paper has assigned me an embedded profile for his entire draft season, and I have to stand in the same press box, ask the same questions, and pretend I don't remember what he said to me at a season-end party two years ago. Our rules were simple. No pads. No promises. Nothing that winds up in ink. We broke all three before Halloween. When a leaked draft of my article puts a paragraph about his family on the internet — a paragraph I did not write — Graham stops speaking to me, and I can't blame him. The people who did write it sit twelve feet from my desk. Now I have one story left to file, and it has my name on it, and it's going to cost me everything. A frenemies-to-lovers sports romance about the worst assignment of my career and the best thing that ever happened to me.