27. Briggs
brIGGS
The overnight flight drops me back into the swirling noise of Harry Reid just past six in the morning.
The league hands down a three-game suspension while I’m still walking through the terminal, and Ted stays on the line with me the whole way to the rental counter, calling it a victory because it wasn’t five.
Three games means that for the first time since October, I have nowhere to be. I aim the car toward Henderson while the sun drags itself up behind me.
My dad won’t be awake for a while, and there are a few ghosts I need to chase before I face him. I drive past the turnoff for his neighborhood and keep going, out toward the edge of the valley where the houses start looking the same.
Her place looks wrong from the curb. Same stucco, same floor plan we picked out of a binder while a saleswoman offered us bottled water. I signed the closing papers from a hotel room in Ottawa and never actually lived in it for more than a month at a stretch.
The lawn is gone now. The whole front yard is decorative rock now, silver-green desert plants tucked into the stone and a paloverde tree staked up in the center.
Ophelia went through with the xeriscaping after all. She’d talked about it for two years while I told her that I’d pay someone to maintain the grass because I liked the idea of something green waiting at home for me.
She also painted the front door a deep, bruised mauve. It used to be sage.
I stand on the welcome mat for a long, agonizing minute. Ophelia only managed a sentence and a half in that arena hallway back in January before I walked away from her. He was going to tell you. He made me promise that—
I knock on the door.
It takes her a while to answer. But when the door finally swings inward, she’s wearing a heavy robe, hair piled up in a messy knot and her face entirely bare. It takes a full ten seconds for her to process what she’s looking at. Then her expression goes completely flat.
“I didn’t do it,” she says.
“I know.”
“I’ve never spoken to a reporter in my life, not about you and certainly not about him.” One hand stays on the door, and the other braces against the frame. “So whatever version of a speech you drove out here to give—”
“Ophelia. I know it wasn’t you.”
That gets her. She looks at me properly then, searching my face for the hook. “Then what are you doing on my porch at seven in the morning?”
“You didn’t get to finish what you were saying at the arena.”
Her hand drops from the frame. “That was five weeks ago.”
“I know exactly how long it’s been.”
“You think you can just show up at my house whenever you want? You should’ve listened to me earlier.”
“That’s fair.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t agree with me.” Her jaw tightens. “It doesn’t mean you’re actually listening.”
“I’m suspended for three games,” I tell her. “I put a kid through the boards last night because my father won’t take my calls. That’s where I am. I need to know what Ziggy made you promise, and you’re the only person left with the answer.”
She looks past my shoulder at the rental car idling in her driveway. “Fine,” she says. “But I need to make some coffee first.”
Inside, the furniture is all wrong. The sectional we fought over in a showroom is gone, replaced by a low burgundy thing with too many pillows. There’s a bookcase where the sixty-five-inch TV used to be.
I sit at the counter. There’s a real espresso machine now, a canister of beans with a date on masking tape, and six sheet pans stacked neatly by the sink.
“You’ve been busy baking,” I say.
“I’ve been working,” she corrects. “Twelve people for a rehearsal dinner tonight, a fortieth birthday on Sunday for a woman who’s changed the menu four times.”
“Since when?”
“About a year and a half.” She slides a cup in front of me. “It’s oat milk. I know how much you hate it.”
“I’ll manage.” I take a sip and wince.
“How’s your dad?”
“He’s furious. Ashamed that he spent his last real talk with Zig apologizing for me.”
Her eyes flutter shut. “Oh, Murphy.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I’m allowed to care about him, Briggs. He’s the one who drove me to the DMV when I first moved here. He called me every single birthday until he couldn’t.”
I swallow hard, the coffee going down bitter. I clear my throat. “So. Tell me.”
“You’ll get it in the order it happened, otherwise you’ll just take one piece and run with it. Can you actually sit in a room for an hour and listen to me talk? It’s a serious question.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I can sit.”
“Then we start in the spring, and it starts with me.” She sits across from me, her hands folded. “I’m an alcoholic,” she says simply. “I was drinking heavily long before anything ever happened with your brother.”
I blink. “How long before?”
“Two years, give or take.” She taps the side of her cup. “You were gone nine months out of twelve. I had a four-bedroom house, no job, and a fiancé who lived on television.”
I frown. “You had people here. Friends.”
“I had your people. Your dad, Ziggy, the guys you played juniors with. They were lovely, Briggs, but they all knew you first.” She shrugs. “I moved into your life and let mine fade away.”
“You never said anything.”
“Briggs.”
“You didn’t.”
“I said I was lonely. Constantly. In this kitchen, on the phone, at your father’s table in front of everyone.” Her voice is steady. “You bought me plane tickets. You bought me a new car. The last time I told you I was struggling, you asked if I wanted to go look at dogs.”
“I was trying to help.”
“You were trying to solve it. There’s a version of you that hears a problem and goes straight to the easy solution.” She sets the cup down. “You did it for four years, and I let you, because it felt like being taken care of, and I was too ashamed to admit it wasn’t enough.”
I have nowhere to put my hands. It’s the same thing my father said, packaged differently, and I hate it just as much.
“I would’ve come back to take care of you.”
“You’d have come home for a broken bone or a funeral. I couldn’t find a way to say I’m drinking alone at 4:00 p.m., and I can’t stop in a way that sounded like an emergency. So I didn’t try.”
“Ophelia, I—”
“Don’t. Not yet.” She raises a hand. “I went to my first meeting in March, three years ago.”
“I thought things were fine then.”
“Yeah, well, I got pulled over at eleven in the morning coming back from the grocery store. The cop let me go, and I sat in a parking lot for an hour and a half.”
My chest constricts. “Jesus.”
“There’s a church off Windmill with a noon session. I went because I had ninety minutes to kill, and I was too terrified to drive home. That’s the whole start of it.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“I told a room full of strangers, which was easier than I thought it would be.” She takes a long, slow breath. “He was already there.”
I go rigid. The room feels suddenly very small. “How long?”
“Five months. He had his chip and everything.” She watches me process it.
“He got up for coffee at the break, and I have never seen a person’s face do what his did.
Afterward, he stood with me in the parking lot for forty minutes because neither of us could find the right words.
Then he said, well, this is the shittiest possible way for this to happen.
I laughed so hard I had to sit on the curb. ”
That’s Ziggy to the core. Blunt and unapologetic about it.
“We had the same sponsor for a while. Renata Silva. She figured out the connection and made us both promise it wouldn’t be an issue.”
“Was it?”
“For eight months, it was the best thing in my life. You were the second.”
I stand up and walk to the sink, bracing my hands on the edge, looking out at the decorative rock where the grass used to grow.
“He was the only person in this city who knew what my Tuesdays were like,” she says behind me. “He relapsed in November. Something happened with a job. He’d been counting on it, and it fell through. He called me from a parking deck downtown. I knew in three words.”
“Where was I?”
“In Charlotte or on a plane.” She shakes her head.
“You were somewhere else. I drove down and got him. He’d had four drinks, and he was crying in a stairwell.
I sat on a concrete step with your brother for two hours.
We ate pancakes at a diner at midnight. I drove him home.
And then I came back here and drank a bottle of wine alone. ”
The granite under my hands is cold.
“Nobody in that stairwell decided to do it. I picked up because he picked up.” She pauses. “Eight months of sobriety, and I threw it away in an hour. I’d do it again tomorrow under the same conditions, which is why I don’t let myself get near them.”
I turn around. “And the rest?”
“Nine days later. We were both drunk at his place. There’s no version of that story that makes it anything other than what it was.” She doesn’t look away. “I’m not going to polish it for you.”
“Okay,” I say.
“It happened eleven more times over the next seven or eight months. So nobody gets to call it a one-night mistake. We drank and we did that, and we drank because we’d done that, and it went in a circle until that summer.”
I’ve rehearsed this conversation for two years. In my head, she begged or cried or told me it was nothing. I never pictured her handing it over like a bill of sale.
“First of July,” I repeat.
“When you checked his phone.”
“Yeah.”
“He called me late that night, which he only did when he was in trouble, and he said, he knows. That was it.” She nods tightly. “We never spoke again after that.”
My stomach turns over.
“He went to a meeting that same night,” she continues. “Renata told me. I switched sponsors within the week because he’d been there first, so I was the one who had to leave.”
“He got sober?” My voice is thin. “When?”
“That week. He didn’t drink again after that. Renata still had him every Thursday.” She waits a beat. “He picked up his two-year chip in July.”
A few months before the car accident. I sit back down because my legs are done. “He got sober the week I stopped talking to him.”
“Yeah, but if you take credit for him getting sober, you have to take the hit for him drinking. He was responsible for that. Anyone in those meetings would tell you the same thing.”
“Then what am I?”
“You’re his brother. He hurt you, and you didn’t call him back.” She leans back. “That’s a lot to carry, Briggs. Don’t try to add to it.” She refills our cups without asking for permission. “He made me promise never to tell you we were drinking. Or that he was, anyway. If you ever asked.”
I stare at her. “Why would he want that?”
“Because he said if you knew he was an alcoholic, you’d have excused it.” She shakes her head. “He didn’t want the discount. He wanted you to hate him for what he actually did. He thought if he stayed sober long enough, he could come to you and let you decide.”
“That’s . . . that’s not fair.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve kept my mouth shut about it for a long time. I’d have kept it shut forever, but he’s gone now, and you’re living with the version where he did it just because he felt like it.”
We sit in the silence for a long time after the last of it is out.
I offer a quiet thanks for her being there when I was miles away, and I apologize for not catching the signs while I was busy tracking my own stats.
It’s a strange reconciliation, but it feels like the first honest ground we’ve stood on in years.
The walk to the threshold is a blur. There’s no hug, no lingering touch, and we both allow the distance to settle between us as the only right way for the story to end.
“Briggs.” She anchors a hand on the frame, her gaze steady. “Go talk to Murphy. Today. Don’t wait until you’ve polished the perfect script.”
I shake my head, my jaw tight. “He said he needed space.”
“He’s in pain, but believe me, he’s waiting for you to show up anyway.” Her chin lifts. “I’m an expert on that kind of thing.”
“Yeah.” I offer a single, stiff nod, the pressure returning behind my ribs. “Goodbye, Ophelia.”
“Goodbye.”
I walk away from the house I once believed was my forever, and I don’t let myself look back.
The dry heat arrives the second I’m clear of the porch, the desert glare already working through the sleeves of my jacket. I aim the rental toward my dad’s place, my brain still doing the math on every truth she handed over.
A few doors down, a woman is standing in her driveway with a hose in one hand and her phone in the other, aiming the lens straight at me. She doesn’t flinch when our eyes lock, hungry for another piece of the mess to upload.
Wonderful.