Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The practice on Christmas Eve morning was always a bit of a shitshow.
Grant toweled off and pulled on a clean shirt.
The brownstone would be quiet tonight. It was quiet most nights, but the holidays sharpened the silence into something with edges.
He'd never minded quiet—had built his entire adult life around it, in fact.
Sought it out. Paid a premium for a double-wide brownstone with no shared walls specifically so he could have more of it.
It had only started bothering him recently.
"Yo, Knight." Kendrick Okafor—left guard, six-four, three-fifteen, and the self-appointed social chair of the offensive line—appeared at the end of the row carrying a gift bag that was far too small for his hands. "Don't leave yet. We got you something."
Grant eyed the bag. "Should I be worried?"
"Deeply." Kendrick grinned. "Fellas!"
They materialized from around the corner like a flash mob that had rehearsed exactly once—Boozy, Terrell, Javi, Thompson with his arm still in a soft cast from the Raiders game. Even Coach Phelps was lurking by the doorway, pretending to check his phone and doing a terrible job of hiding his smile.
"We had a hard time this year," Kendrick said, assuming the posture of a man delivering a eulogy. "Finding you a gift. Because what do you get the man who has everything—except, apparently, a girlfriend."
"Here we go," Grant muttered.
"The man who can read a Cover 2 shell in under a second but can't read a room full of women." Kendrick held up the bag. "The man with a name like Knight who still can't rescue himself."
Terrell lost it first. Then Boozy, who laughed so hard he had to sit down on the bench. Even Thompson was wheezing, which had to hurt his ribs.
Grant took the bag. Inside: a book. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Finding Mr. Right, dog-eared and clearly purchased from a thrift store, with a Post-it on the cover that read:
We believe in you champ
Grant turned it over and pretended to study the back cover with genuine concentration. "Does this work for finding Ms. Right, or do I need the companion volume?"
"See, that's your problem right there," Kendrick said. "You're already overcomplicating it."
"Man can dissect a Tampa 2 but can't ask a woman to dinner," Javi added, shaking his head with theatrical sadness.
"I can ask a woman to dinner."
"Can you, though?" Boozy raised his eyebrows. "Because the evidence suggests—"
"The evidence suggests I need new friends."
That got a laugh—the kind that rattled off the metal lockers and filled the room with something warm and profane and familiar. These were men who'd bled for each other on Sundays and would never, under any circumstances, let a teammate have a bad day without making it worse first.
Grant tucked the book into his duffel. "I'm keeping this."
"You better. Cost us twenty bucks.”
"Highway robbery."
"That's what Boozy said." Kendrick slapped Grant's shoulder. "Merry Christmas, Cap. Try not to spend the whole break alone watching film like a psychopath."
"I make no promises."
The locker room thinned. Guys filtered out in waves, and the fluorescent hum filled the spaces they left behind.
Grant was pulling on his jacket when West appeared at the end of the row.
He had that look—the one where he was trying to be casual about something that wasn't casual. West was impenetrable on the field, but Grant had been reading him since they were twelve.
"Hey." West leaned against the locker frame. "You coming tomorrow?"
Tomorrow. Christmas dinner. Serle's roast, John's turmeric lattes, the whole noisy, overstuffed, medically anxious production that had been Grant's second home for half his life.
"I don't think so this year." Grant kept his voice even. "Gonna stay in. Watch some film."
"On Christmas Day."
"Philly's zone coverage is top of the league right now. And it looks like Wilkins and Diamino are coming off IR."
West was quiet for a beat. Grant could feel him calculating.
"Mom's doing her stuffing," West said. "The one with the sausage and the apples."
"Tell her I said thanks."
Another pause. Longer this time.
Three weeks. Three weeks of away games and film sessions and the grinding machinery of a playoff push, and every single one of them had included a moment—usually late, usually alone, usually in a hotel room in a city he didn't care about—where he'd picked up his phone and stared at her name and put it back down.
He'd heard she'd left Elite Connections.
West had mentioned it in passing, careful and clipped, the way he mentioned anything Emmy-adjacent these days.
Grant hadn't asked for details. Didn't trust himself to ask for details, because asking led to thinking and thinking led to the brownstone and the brownstone led to his car keys and his car keys led to her apartment and he'd already driven halfway there twice before pulling over and turning around.
She didn't want to hear from him. He'd sent the termination contract without a word—just his signature, clean and final—because the contract needed to end and the words he actually wanted to say would have been a different kind of detonation.
And then the silence had calcified into something load-bearing, and he'd told himself it was the right call.
"How's Emmy?"
The question came out raw, unshaped—a toss-off, a footnote. Instead it landed in the quiet locker room with the weight of something he'd been carrying for weeks.
West's expression shifted. Not anger—something more complicated.
"She's fine." West rubbed the back of his neck. "I think. I haven't really seen her, honestly."
Grant absorbed that. Emmy, alone in that apartment with the sage green armchair and the unlit candle, and neither of them had been to see her.
"She hasn't been bothering you again, has she?" West said it quickly, like he'd been holding it. "Because if she's been calling or showing up or—I can talk to her."
"What?" Grant frowned. "No."
"I just know how she gets. She fixates, and she doesn't always know when to—"
"Dude. She can bother me all she wants."
The words sat between them. Grant heard what they sounded like a half-second after they left his mouth.
West heard it too. His eyes narrowed. Not hostile. Searching.
"You two aren't..."
Grant exhaled. A long, slow breath through his nose.
"No," he said. The word came out flatter than he'd meant it to.
West nodded. Held his gaze a beat longer than necessary. Then pushed off the locker frame.
"Well. Offer stands. Mom will keep a plate."
"Yeah."
West turned to go, then stopped. "Grant."
"Yeah."
"Merry Christmas, man."
"Merry Christmas."
West disappeared around the corner. His footsteps faded. A door opened and closed, and then the locker room was just Grant and the hum of the lights and the weight of a three-letter lie still sitting in the air where he'd left it.
No.
He grabbed his keys and walked out.
The parking lot was half-empty, the late afternoon sky doing that thing where it couldn't decide between gray and purple. December in New England—the sun was already giving up by four o'clock, slinking behind the stadium like it had somewhere better to be.
Grant's breath came out in clouds. He was reaching for his keys when he heard her.
"Grant!"
He turned. Bailey was crossing the lot, zipping up her puffer jacket. She must have just dropped off Dr. Nwosu—Jenny's car was perpetually in the shop, and Bailey had been her ride to the facility since before Grant had met either of them.
"Merry Christmas Eve," Bailey said. "How are you? The Jets game looked brutal."
"Controlled brutality. That's the job description."
"Mmm. You should put that on a T-shirt." She pulled her gloves on, studying him with the same frank attention she'd brought to their three dates—direct, warm, unbothered by the silences other people rushed to fill. "You look tired."
"'Tis the season."
Bailey tilted her head. "How's Emmy?"
The name landed like a finger on a bruise.
Grant kept his face neutral—or tried to.
Bailey had always been hard to hide from.
It was one of the things he'd liked about her, and one of the reasons they hadn't worked.
She saw too clearly, and what she saw was a man whose attention was already spoken for.
"Haven't talked to her," Grant said.
"Really?" Bailey's eyebrows rose. “I assumed you two would be…wait. She didn't tell you?"
"Tell me what?"
"She ambushed me." Bailey said it lightly, almost amused. "Outside Mass General. Seven in the morning. I'd just come off a twelve-hour shift and there she was on a bench near the entrance, looking like she'd been there awhile."
Grant's hand stilled on his car keys.
"She'd found out we weren't together anymore," Bailey continued. "Thought it was because of her—the leak, the press, all of it. She apologized. Tried to convince me to give you another chance." She paused. "It was sweet, actually.”
The parking lot was quiet. Somewhere in the stadium, a door slammed. Wind rattled a chain-link fence along the perimeter.
"She tried to get you to take me back," Grant said. Not a question.
"She made a very compelling case. You should hear her in full matchmaker mode." Bailey smiled. "She told me you were worth it. That whatever she'd broken, I shouldn't let her mistakes be the reason I walked away from someone like you."
Grant's chest did something he didn't have words for. A compression. A dropping.
Emmy had gone to Bailey. Not to apologize for herself.
Not to explain or justify or spin. She'd gone to fix the thing she thought she'd broken—his relationship with someone else.
She'd stood outside a hospital at dawn and argued for a woman to take him back, knowing that if it worked, she'd lose him.
The matchmaker making one last match. And this time it cost her everything she wanted.
"She was trying really hard not to be in love with you," Bailey said quietly. "It wasn't working."