Epilogue
AVERY
August
The last time I’d been to this place, I’d been an impossible mix of numbness and excruciating pain. Absolutely torn apart from the inside out, but also detached and certain I was never going to feel anything again, least of all anything good.
That had been the second worst day of my life, just ten days after the absolute worst.
Today…
Today was bittersweet.
Walking across a gentle slope of sun-dappled grass beneath sheltering trees, I was happy despite the lump firmly lodged in my throat.
I carried a small bouquet of flowers in one hand. In my other, I laced my fingers between Peyton’s, grateful for the company and the affection.
Am I ready for this?
I’m ready for this.
I took a deep breath of the warm air.
I think I’m ready for this.
“You okay?” Peyton asked.
I nodded. “Yeah. It’s just hard. Coming back to…” I gestured around us.
He gave my hand a reassuring squeeze. “We can do it another day if you want to.”
“No.” I kept walking. “It’s going to be hard no matter what, but… I want to do this.”
He didn’t argue or protest. He just stayed with me as we followed the path.
Peyton and I had flown into ?rebro, Sweden, a week ago with Rachel and the kids, and we were staying at a hotel in town while they stayed with her in-laws. Since coming here, we’d divided our time between helping her with the little ones, spending time with Leif’s family, and playing tourists.
The whole time, today had been in the back of my mind. I’d needed to do it. I’d wanted to. I’d just been afraid I couldn’t handle it.
It had taken me until today to work up the courage to come here. No one had pushed. Not Peyton. Not Rachel. Not Leif’s family.
This morning, I’d finally been as ready as I would ever be, and now here we were.
When we stopped, my skin prickled with goose bumps and my eyes stung, but I didn’t cry. Mostly, I just took in my surroundings, letting reality settle onto my shoulders.
There’d been people crowded around last year. A casket. A hole in the ground.
Now it was just us and a headstone:
Leif Adrian Erlandsson.
There was more inscribed, most of it in Swedish, but I was too fixated on his name to try to parse any of it.
I pushed out a ragged breath as I knelt.
I tucked a crisp hundred-dollar bill into the bouquet—I had lost the bet, after all—and carefully put the flowers along the base of the headstone.
Then, with my heart in my throat, I traced my fingertips over his name.
Seeing it carved in stone like that was just so… final.
I can’t believe you’re not here anymore.
My therapist had assured me that moments like this were normal.
Moments when it took my breath away to realize Leif was gone, and I had to recalibrate to this new normal.
These moments, she assured me, would be fewer and farther between over time, but if one hit me a year from now or twenty years from now, it didn’t mean anything was wrong with me. It was just how grief worked.
“They’re hard,” she’d said. “They’re painful, though they will probably hurt less over time. But it’s okay to sit with those moments. Pause and let yourself think about him and how much you miss him. Part of keeping his memory alive means keeping a certain amount of grief alive, and that’s okay.”
I’d understood at the time what she’d meant, but it was times like this—when I was running my fingertips over my best friend’s name carved in stone—that I felt it to my core.
Yeah, it still hurt. Sometimes it even hurt physically, from my aching chest to that uncomfortable lump in my throat to the sting in my eyes.
But that was the price of having someone as amazing as Leif in my world.
I couldn’t love someone that hard without grieving them this hard.
Especially now with some time, distance, and therapy, I wouldn’t trade the friendship we’d had for anything.
Not even if it meant never feeling grief like this again.
I traced a letter in his name one more time, then rose, my knee cracking because I’d been crouched for so long. I exhaled and rolled my shoulders.
Peyton’s hand landed gently on the small of my back. “You all right?”
“Yeah.” I turned to him, and his concerned expression ignited a completely different ache in my chest. Leif would’ve been insufferable, watching me fall for Peyton like I had.
He’d have gotten back at me for all the playful teasing I’d done when he’d been stupid for Rachel, because God knew I was that stupid for Peyton now.
I wished Leif could’ve been here for this. To see how ridiculous I was over this man. To give me all the heckling and chirping I richly deserved. And to, at some point when we were alone, look at me and say in all seriousness, “I’m glad to see you this happy with someone, Avery.”
That moment had never come, but I could see it and hear it and feel it as clearly as a memory.
I could feel its absence, simultaneously hating how it had been taken away and being grateful that I’d had time—however short it had turned out it be—with the man who I was sure would’ve eventually said those words.
Peyton must’ve seen something in my eyes, because without a word, he reeled me in close. Arms wrapped around me, he stroked my hair as I leaned on him. I didn’t cry. I’d been sure all the way here that I would, but now, I just relaxed into Peyton’s embrace and let the peace settle over me.
“I’m glad to see you this happy with someone, Avery.”
Yeah. Me too.
Carding his fingers through my hair, Peyton softly asked, “You sure you’re okay?”
I exhaled, then drew back to meet his gaze. “I’m good. It’s hard, you know?” I nodded toward the headstone. “I think it always will be. But I’m not a mess like I was before.”
Peyton gently cradled my face in both hands. “You were never a mess. You were going through hell.” He pressed the softest kiss to my forehead, then another to my lips. “If I’d lost someone like him, I wouldn’t have been in any better shape.”
The lump in my throat grew, and I leaned into him again, resting my head against his shoulder and closing my eyes as he wrapped his arms around me.
If I’d learned anything going through the last year, it was how fortunate I was to have so many good people in my life.
That whole time I’d been trying desperately to be stronger than I was, I’d been oblivious to just how many people cared about me.
They didn’t want me to be strong—they wanted me to be okay.
And more and more as time went on, I believed I would be. I believed I was.
Though I’d long since finished the player assistance program, I still saw Shannon twice a month, and she’d been a godsend.
When she’d told me I’d have moments where the grief would stop me in my tracks, she’d also gone on to explain that contrary to popular belief, grief didn’t just go away.
There didn’t come a point where it was wrapped up in a neat little bow and stored on a shelf.
Closure was more like turning a page than closing a book—it was forward motion, it was distance, but wasn’t the end.
For many people, that grief never completely went away.
At first, I’d been devastated by the idea of feeling like this forever, but she’d gone on to tell me that understanding that if I still grieved, I wasn’t broken or overreacting.
The more she’d explained it, the more I’d realized what she was getting at: that once I let go of the idea that it would be gone forever, the more I could make peace with it being a diminishing constant.
The more I could be gentle with myself and let myself experience those periods of grief when they came, rather than worry I was backsliding or wallowing.
“Twenty years from now,” Shannon had told me one day, “you might have gone for quite a while without thinking about it. Or you’ve thought about him, but it’s happy memories now, and you’re at peace.
But then one day, you see or hear something that reminds you of Leif, and it makes you sad.
That doesn’t mean you need to rush into a therapist’s office or worry that you’re not healing as much as you should.
It just means you still remember how much you loved him and how much you wish he was still there.
You can sit with that feeling for a little while, let yourself be sad and feel that grief, and then the next day you’ll be thinking about happy memories again. It’s okay.”
These days, I understood what she’d meant.
In the year since Leif had died, I’d been able to remember the happy times more and more.
I could talk about Leif without choking up, though sometimes that still happened.
I’d made peace with the fact that there were bad days as well as good days, and slowly, the good days had begun to outnumber the bad.
And credit where it was due—the man holding me right now had been a godsend.
There’d been a few times where I’d been having an awful day—when everything had caught up with me and I’d been overwhelmed with grief—and Peyton would sit me down and ask me to talk about the good times.
He never seemed patronizing, either. He genuinely seemed to want to know all about the friend I’d lost just before we’d met, and he listened intently while I reminisced.
I’d usually struggle through the first couple of stories, but as I went on, I’d feel better, and by the time I’d finished, I was still raw, but less brittle.
Less focused on the void Leif had left behind and instead reminded of all the reasons he’d been so hard to lose.
Though my relationship with Peyton had been heavily intertwined with the aftermath of losing Leif, that grief and heartache didn’t define us.
As the season had gone on—and especially during the off season—we’d been able to focus on each other.
We’d roomed together on road trips, and nothing in the world left me more refreshed and ready to play than waking up from a pregame nap in Peyton’s arms.