Chapter 19 Tanner #2
Then he was gone, and I was alone with the decision I’d made and the hours stretching before me like a gauntlet.
The stadium was worse than I remembered.
Not physically—it was just a building, concrete and steel and too-green turf under lights that turned the afternoon into something artificial.
But the noise hit me like a wall the moment I walked through the gates.
Sixty thousand people screaming, the marching band’s brass section punching through the chaos, the rumble of feet on bleachers that I could feel in my teeth.
Marcus's mom was a small woman with kind eyes and the sort of easy warmth my mother hadn't been able to manage since Dad died.
I'd seen glimpses of it returning at Thanksgiving—especially around Frank—but something in me still ached for it.
Mrs. Thompson offered it freely, and I let myself soak it in.
“You must be Tanner.” She pulled me into a hug before I could protest. “Seth talks about you constantly. I’m so glad you could make it.”
“Thank you for the ticket,” I managed.
She waved a hand dismissively and guided me toward our section, one hand light on my elbow.
“Please. We always have an extra seat in case our daughter comes home for the weekend, and Marcus mentioned you hadn’t been to a game yet this season.
” She glanced at me sideways, something careful in her expression.
“He also mentioned this might be hard for you. Your dad played, didn’t he? ”
My throat tightened. “Yeah. He did.”
She didn’t push, just squeezed my arm gently. “Well, you’re sitting with us. And if it gets to be too much, you just say the word, and we’ll go get overpriced nachos until you feel better. Deal?”
I found my seat next to her and gripped the armrests hard enough to leave indents in the plastic. Breathe. This was just sound. Just people watching a game, the same way millions of people watched games every weekend. It didn’t mean anything. It couldn’t hurt me.
“There’s our boys,” Mrs. Thompson said, pointing as the team took the field for warm-ups.
I spotted Seth immediately—number fifty-four, moving through stretches with the easy grace that had first caught my attention months ago.
He looked up toward the stands, scanning, and I raised my hand. Even from a distance, I saw his smile.
“He’s been different lately,” Mrs. Thompson said, not looking at me. “Happier. Marcus noticed it too.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
That helped. Remembering why I was here, who I was here for.
The first quarter was fine. I focused on Seth, tracked his movements, let the game fade into background noise. He made a tackle on a third down that drew a roar from the crowd, and I found myself cheering with them, surprised by the sound of my own voice.
This was okay. I could do this.
The second quarter got harder. One of the opposing players took a hit that snapped his head back, and even though he got up a moment later, I couldn’t stop seeing the trajectory.
The angle of impact. The way his neck had bent.
I knew, from my research, exactly what forces were being applied to his brain in that moment.
Knew how many more hits like that it would take before the damage became permanent.
I closed my eyes and counted my breaths. When I opened them, Seth was looking up at the stands again, checking on me. I forced a smile and a thumbs-up, even though it was unlikely he could pick me out in the crowd.
Halftime came as a relief. I bought a coffee I didn’t want just to have something to do with my hands, let the liquid burn my tongue, reminded myself I was choosing to be here. That I could leave whenever I wanted.
The third quarter started, and I made myself watch.
Really watch, not just track Seth’s jersey.
The game was close—tied at seventeen, both teams fighting for every yard.
Seth was everywhere, it seemed, making stops, calling adjustments, moving with a confidence that made my chest ache.
This was his world. The version of him that existed on this field was someone I rarely got to see—focused, commanding, alive in a way that felt almost foreign.
I wondered if this was what it had been like for Mom, watching Dad play. Before everything went wrong. Before the sport became a slow-motion death sentence instead of something to celebrate.
Fourth quarter. Our ball, third and long, two minutes left. The crowd was deafening, everyone on their feet, and I stood with them because staying seated felt impossible. Seth lined up in the backfield, his stance coiled and ready.
The ball snapped. Bodies collided. I lost track of which jersey was which in the chaos—
And then I saw him.
Seth, ball tucked against his chest, cutting across the field toward the first down marker. Full speed, head down, fighting for every yard the way he’d been taught.
The linebacker saw him coming. Lowered his shoulder.
They met in the middle of the field with a sound I felt in my spine.
Seth went down.
He didn’t get up.
The stadium went quiet. Not silent—sixty thousand people don’t go silent—but the roar dropped to a murmur, confused and uncertain.
I watched the players gather around him, watched the trainers sprint onto the field, watched his teammates take a knee like they’d been trained to do when someone was hurt.
Seth wasn’t moving.
The sound that came out of me wasn’t human. It was something animal, something torn from a place I’d spent years trying to wall off. My knees buckled, and I grabbed for the seat in front of me, missed, felt myself going down—
Arms caught me. Mrs. Thompson, stronger than she looked, was pulling me back up, holding me against her.
“I can’t—” The words came out broken, jagged. “I can’t do this. I can’t—”
“Breathe, sweetheart. Just breathe.”
But I couldn’t breathe. The stadium was too loud and too quiet all at once, the lights too bright, the air too thick.
I was back in the hospital hallway, waiting for news about Dad.
I was in the waiting room when the doctor came out and said words like “swelling,” “induced coma,” and “prepare yourselves.” I was standing at a grave watching them lower a casket into the ground while Hunter held my arm because my mother couldn’t.
“He’s not moving.” I was shaking so hard my teeth were chattering. “Why isn’t he moving? He should be moving by now—”
“The trainers are with him. They know what they’re doing.”
“You don’t understand.” I was crying now, ugly and desperate, and I didn’t care who saw.
“My dad— It wasn’t one hit, it was all of them.
Years of them. He kept playing, and we kept watching, and every single time he got back up, but it didn’t matter because the damage was already happening.
And now I’m watching Seth take hit after hit, and I can’t— I can’t do this. I can’t watch someone I—”
Mrs. Thompson’s arms tightened around me. She didn’t tell me it would be okay. She didn’t offer empty promises or hollow reassurances. She just held me while I fell apart, one hand rubbing slow circles on my back, her voice a low, steady murmur against my hair.
“I know, honey. I know.”
My phone was in my hand. I didn’t remember taking it out.
On the field, the trainers were kneeling beside Seth. One of them was checking his neck, holding his head still, and that couldn’t be good, that meant something was wrong with his spine or his skull or—
His hand moved.
I saw it from fifty yards away, the slight flex of his fingers against the turf. Conscious. He was conscious.
The breath I released came out as something closer to a sob.
They were bringing out the stretcher. The careful way they lifted him onto it, immobilizing his head, strapping him down—I knew that protocol.
I’d watched it a hundred times, had memorized it the way some people memorize sports statistics because knowing felt like control, and I was so fucking desperate for control.
Seth’s arm lifted as they carried him off the field. Waving, maybe. Letting everyone know he was okay.
I didn’t believe it.
I was already moving, pushing past the people in my row, ignoring the annoyed mutters as I stepped on feet and knocked into knees. The tunnel. I needed to get to the tunnel where they’d be taking him, needed to find wherever the medical staff brought injured players, needed to see him.
“Sir, you can’t go down there—”
I barely registered the security guard stepping into my path. “My— He’s my—” The words tangled in my throat. What was Seth to me? Roommate? Boyfriend? The person I’d spent months falling for despite every instinct screaming at me to run?
“Family only beyond this point.”
“I’m— Please.” My voice cracked. I hated how desperate I sounded, how young. “Please, I just need to see him.”
Something in my face must have registered because the guard’s expression softened slightly. “They’re taking him to the ER for evaluation. University Medical Center. It’s about ten minutes from here.”
“University Medical Center,” I repeated, the words hollow in my mouth.
“There’s a shuttle that runs from the east lot, or you can take your own car. The ER entrance is on the north side of the building.”
I was already moving, pushing back through the crowd that had started buzzing again now that the game was resuming without Seth. I didn’t care about the game. I didn’t care about anything except getting to that hospital.
The drive was a blur—traffic lights and turn signals and my hands gripping the steering wheel so tight my knuckles went white. I found the ER entrance, abandoned my car in the first spot I could find, and ran through the automatic doors like something was chasing me.
The waiting room was half-full, a mix of worried families and people holding ice packs to various injuries. I pushed past them to the intake desk, where a tired-looking nurse glanced up from her computer.
“I need— There was a player injured at the stadium. Seth Landry. They were bringing him here.”
She typed something into her system, frowning at the screen. “Are you family?”
“Brother.” The lie scraped my throat. She looked at me for a long moment, something skeptical in the set of her mouth, but whatever she saw in my face—the red-rimmed eyes, the barely contained panic—must have been enough. I watched her decide not to challenge it.
“Take a seat. Someone will be out to update you when we know more.”
I didn’t sit. I couldn’t sit. I paced the small lobby like a caged animal, counting tiles and light fixtures and anything else that might keep me from completely falling apart. My hands were shaking. My whole body was shaking, fine tremors running through me like aftershocks.
The lobby was too bright, too sterile—fluorescent lights humming overhead, the faint antiseptic smell that clung to every medical facility I’d ever been in.
A water cooler gurgled in the corner. Motivational posters lined the walls, athletes in mid-stride with words like DEDICATION and PERSEVERANCE printed beneath them. I wanted to tear them down.
This was why I didn’t go to games. This was why I’d kept myself at a distance, why I’d fought so hard against falling for someone who did this every week.
Because the moment I let myself care, the moment I let him in, I became this: a wreck in a waiting room, not knowing if the person I loved was going to be okay.
The person I loved.
The realization should have been a revelation, but it felt more like an admission. Something I’d known for weeks, maybe longer, that I’d refused to name because naming it made it real. Made it something I could lose.
And now he was somewhere behind those doors, and no one was telling me anything, and all I could do was pace and count and try not to think about the last time I’d waited in a room like this.
The last time someone I loved had been hurt and I couldn’t do anything but wait.
Dad’s face, slack and pale against hospital pillows.
The beeping of machines. The way hope had curdled into dread over hours, then days, then the terrible final moment when the beeping stopped.
I pulled out my phone, pulled up our text thread, and typed with shaking fingers. I had no clue if someone had gotten his phone to him, but I needed him to know he’s wasn’t alone.
I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.
The screen blurred. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and kept pacing. And then I felt stupid because Seth’s phone was likely still in his locker back at the stadium. He probably wouldn’t get it back until he got out of here.
Somewhere in the building, they were running tests. Checking Seth’s spine, his skull, his brain. Somewhere behind those doors, Seth was either okay or he wasn’t, and I had no way of knowing which.
All I could do was wait.