Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
THEO
Whistles are supposed to make you heard. Mine barely cuts through the noise in my head.
I’m moving up and down the sideline, tracking feet and hands, counting three seconds in the lane, but all I really see is Caden’s gaze every time he glances my way.
It sits under my skin like heat, steady and unblinking, and it makes the court feel two sizes too small.
I keep my calls clean, my voice even, but Soren’s bullshit is still humming in my bones, and I can’t shake the image of Caden’s jaw tightening when he swallowed his temper.
By the time the final horn sounds, my smile is on autopilot.
I blow the whistle once, give the players a quick “Good run” and a nod to the bleachers, and then I’m moving—off the floor, through the side door, past the trophy case with our dust-fogged faces trapped behind glass.
I need air. My whole body feels buzzy and wrong, like a radio between stations.
I want to reach for him. That urge is so strong, it’s almost a pain.
I want to find him in the crowd, touch his wrist, say something stupid like “You were beautiful out there,” because he was.
I want to say I’m sorry again, as if repetition could sand down the edges of what happened.
But I can’t. Fifteen years is a canyon you don’t jump because you feel brave for five minutes.
So I walk.
The corridor to the lot is quiet, dimmer than the gym, smelling like floor wax and old paper.
My sneakers scuff the tile. My heart does this uneven stutter-step that has nothing to do with running the baseline and everything to do with the man who just played ten of the most breathtaking minutes I’ve ever watched.
He was strong. Not in a trying-to-prove-it way, but in the way a tree looks strong after a storm—roots deep, trunk scarred, still standing.
The first time he planted on the prosthetic and rose for that elbow jumper, the whole gym inhaled at once.
When the ball dropped through the net clean, the sound that followed wasn’t just cheering.
It was relief. It was pride. It was awe.
Mine most of all.
And I still saw it—the exact second he reached his limit.
The tiny change in his footwork, the half beat he needed to reset.
The small protective shift in his shoulders when he came down from a rebound.
Ten minutes. I should have been savoring them like everyone else.
Instead, guilt hooked into me because I knew that threshold like my own heartbeat.
I’m the one who put it there. I can call it an accident until I run out of breath, and it will still be the single worst choice I’ve ever made: believing I could keep us safe on a road I was already losing to fatigue.
He’s lived with it every day since. Learning to stand, to walk, to run again.
The phantom pain he likely pretends isn’t bad when weather rolls in.
The way people stare, or don’t, as if looking might be a verdict.
What I felt in the gym wasn’t pity. It was awe and love and the kind of pride that makes your chest hurt.
It was also the same old gnawing guilt with new teeth.
No wonder he cut me out. No wonder he had to. I wouldn’t forgive me either.
Sun hits me square in the face when I push through the doors at the end of the hall. The parking lot is a flicker of chrome and white gravel glare. I walk until I hit the thin shadow thrown by the flagpole and stop there, dragging air in and out until my pulse stops punching.
I should go home. Shower. Pretend I’m excited about volunteering at a “Totally ’80s” prom.
I should find the box of neon headbands Maddie dropped in my room and practice not dying of secondhand embarrassment when I hand them out tonight.
Mostly, I need to get my head straight enough not to say something catastrophic the second I see him again.
I make it three steps toward my truck before Justin Kirkwood comes striding across the lot like a man with a plan alongside three backup plans in his pocket.
“Theo!” he calls, that deep voice of his carrying without effort. He looks like every spreadsheet ever made decided to become a person: neat, capable, built like a brick wall in a button-down he somehow hasn’t sweated through. He breaks into a jog for the last few feet. “Hey, hey—hold up.”
“Hey, Kirkwood.” I force a grin. “If this is about the icebreaker supplies I ‘lost’ last night, I have no comment.”
He huffs a laugh and studies my face. “I’m actually checking on you.”
“I’m good,” I lie, then soften. “I’m… upright.”
His eyes flick toward the gym doors, then back. “You were somewhere else for half that game. Not a complaint. Just an observation.”
“I was reffing,” I say. “Not performing magic tricks.”
“You were reffing while boring a hole through one particular alum with your eyes,” he says, tone gentle, not teasing. He lifts his hands when I look away. “I’m not prying. I just wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”
“It’s… complicated.”
“Isn’t it always?” He tips his head. “You two have history. Even people who don’t know know.”
I squint at him. “What does that mean?”
He shrugs, mouth tilting. “It means senior spring, you and North weren’t as subtle as you thought you were. I was student body president, not blind.”
Heat climbs up my neck before I can stop it. I glance away at the empty baseball field, the sun throwing diamonds across the outfield. “We were careful.”
“You were careful,” Justin says kindly. “And you were seventeen. Seventeen-year-olds leak feelings out of their pores. It was… sweet, actually.” He pauses.
“And later… I knew something bad happened, and then he was gone. Most of us never got the details. You know how small towns work. Too much noise, not enough truth.”
I swallow. He doesn’t push. He just stands there and lets the silence be a place I can put something down in.
“Soren being an asshole didn’t help,” I say finally.
Justin’s expression ices over for a beat. “Did he say something to Caden?”
“Yeah,” I say. “He made a comment. About the accident. About his leg. I shut it down. Caden did too. But still.” My jaw aches. I unclench it. “I wanted to throw him into the bleachers.”
“Get in line,” Justin mutters. He drags a hand over his beard. “I’ll talk to Vanessa. If he stirs up more trouble tonight, we’ll have him escorted out. This is a fundraiser, not a reenactment of his worst impulses.”
A laugh surfaces, quick and grateful. “Thanks.”
Justin watches me for another moment. “How are things… between you and Caden?”
“Strained,” I say, because I am tired of lying by omission. “But we both seem to be trying. Or… willing to be in the same room without bolting for the exits.”
“That’s not nothing,” he says. “Is he here with anyone?”
I shake my head, my gut bottoming out at just the thought of it. “Not that I’ve seen.”
He nods. The early-afternoon heat warms the top of my head. A group of alumni meanders toward the lot, laughing. Student volunteers wheel a cart of paper cups back inside. The ordinary life of the day presses around us and makes everything feel both too big and mercifully small.
“You know,” Justin says, almost offhandedly, “tonight could be a chance. The prom you never had.”
I freeze.
He lifts a palm. “I’m not saying make a scene.
I’m not even saying dance if you don’t want to.
I’m saying… the theme’s cheesy, but the night’s yours if you take it.
You were a junior when our class had prom.
You weren’t allowed. He went because he had to.
Maybe tonight is the one you give yourselves. Whatever that looks like.”
The idea hits me like a floodlight. Bright. Blinding. It is so tempting, I almost sway toward it.
But then the other thing rushes in—the memory of Caden in a hospital bed, telling me to leave.
The way I watched his parents’ taillights disappear down our street a short time later.
Years of birthdays where my phone stayed dark because I had no right to text him.
All the almosts I filled with people who were kind and fine but not him.
“I don’t know if I deserve that,” I say softly.
Justin studies me for a long second. When he speaks, his voice is gentler than I’ve ever heard it. “I can’t answer that. I can only say… he came back. That has to mean something.”
My eyes sting. I blink hard and breathe, steady and deep, like I tell my players to do when they miss an easy layup and want to hurl the ball at the ceiling.
“I have to help set up tonight,” I say, because facts are safer. “Vanessa’s got me on centerpiece duty and ‘general vibes,’ which I’m pretty sure is code for ‘move chairs until Justin is satisfied.’”
He cracks a smile. “Absolutely code for that.” He claps my shoulder once, solid and warm. “Go home. Shower. Eat something that isn’t a granola bar. Then show up and let the night be the night. If it’s awkward, we’ll blame the decade-specific playlist.”
“Please do,” I say. “If ‘Take On Me’ starts and I cry, tell people I stubbed my toe.”
He snorts. “I’ll say you’re allergic to synthesizers.” He takes a step back. “You’re not alone, Theo. Even when it feels like you are.”
I nod, because anything else will turn my voice to gravel.
He heads back toward the school with the long, purposeful stride of a man who lives for a plan, and I stand there in the thin slice of shade until the sweat cools on my neck.
The guilt is still there, but it’s shapeshifted.
It lives alongside the other thing now—the feeling from the court when I watched Caden plant and rise and release like the game was still in his bones and would be until the end of everything.