Chapter 9
Jax
Mickey Byrne, it turned out, was a man who liked to talk.
Not like the other men in Ballybeg, who fired off opinions the way Dee fired off insults—fast and with sharp aim. Mickey talked the way a boxer moved: measured, direct, always with a purpose.
He also had a way about him that made me talk to him, tell him things that I didn’t usually discuss.
Mickey handed me a bottle of water and sat on the edge of the ring. “You run like something’s chasing you.”
We’d just worked the heavy bag, and my arms felt like wet cement. After running enough laps around the dirt track behind the gym to carve a groove into it, my legs felt like jelly.
I drank half the bottle before answering. “Old habit.”
“What kind of habit?”
I sat beside him, elbows on my knees, lungs still burning.
Outside, the wind was doing what the wind in Ballybeg did at all hours—making itself known. I could hear it worrying at the corrugated iron walls.
“I started running seriously when I was seventeen. Got into golf around the same time. Needed to get out of my house for reasons I won’t bore you with.”
Mickey chuckled. “I’m not easy to bore, boyo.”
I glanced at him. Sixty-something. Built like a fire hydrant. Hands that had been through wars—probably because they had. His face was a map of old decisions. He didn’t look scandalized by much.
“My father and I didn’t get along.”
“What kind of not getting along?”
“The kind where I told him I was going to play professional golf instead of joining the family business, and he told me if I walked out that door, I was no son of his.” I took another long drink. “So I walked out.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-three. Just graduated. Got a degree in business at Notre Dame, as people like me do.” I smiled without humor. “Thought I’d be fine, even though I was doing what no one in my circles did.”
“Which was?”
“Choosing myself and figuring the rest out.”
“Were you fine?”
“Eventually.”
I turned the bottle in my hands. “There was a girl. Dani. We’d been together since we were fifteen. She was everything—in the way the first person you love is everything. You don’t know yet the world is full of people, so the one you have feels like the only one.”
Mickey made a low sound of agreement.
“She waited while I tried to find my footing on tour. The first year was rough. I was broke and proud and too stubborn to ask my family for help—even if they’d offered it, which they didn’t. Dani was patient. Or so I thought.”
I capped the bottle and set it down.
“What I didn’t know was that she was waiting for me to fail. Waiting for me to break so I’d go home. She thought golf was a phase.”
“Considering you won the GPL twice, it wasn’t,” Mickey mused.
“It wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
The sound that left me was half sigh, half surrender. “She left me. The day after I lost my first major.” I gave a short, humorless laugh. “I lost big time! Didn’t even make the cut. Packed my bags on Friday while the rest of the field played the weekend.”
Mickey winced. “You’ve got to lose some to win some.”
“Dani didn’t see it that way. When I lost, she told me it was time to go home. Said she’d talked to my father. The two of them had decided that would be best.”
Mickey’s brows lifted. “She talked to your da?”
I nodded. “Turns out she and my parents were waiting for me to fail.”
Mickey didn’t rush me.
“When I said I was staying on tour, she said she’d had enough. Said she needed someone ambitious about business, about status. Said she didn’t believe I’d make anything of golf—and she wasn’t slummin’ it with me.”
The memory still burned. I dragged a hand down my face.
“I understood her logic,” I admitted quietly. “I just didn’t understand what it would cost me.”
“What did it cost you?” Mickey asked.
I considered that.
“I stopped believing people stay. Not just women—anyone. My father came back around when I won my first championship. Suddenly, I was worth his time. I saw Dani at a charity event the next year—married to a banker from Charleston, ring the size of a golf ball, looking exactly like she’d planned her life to look.
” I exhaled. “I’m genuinely happy for her.
But something in me decided then I wasn’t the kind of man women stayed for. ”
Silence stretched between us. After a long three minutes, Mickey said, “You know what Ballybeg runs on?”
“Tell me.”
“Stubbornness. Terrible stubbornness. And the refusal to accept something’s lost when it isn’t.” He studied me. “Dee Gallagher’s got a bit of that.”
A smile touched my lips as I thought about darlin’ Dee. “A bit.”
“And you,” he said confidently.
“I came to Ballybeg by accident, Mickey.”
“Aye.” He clapped my shoulder. “Most important things happen that way, boyo.”