8. Rhett
RHETT
The estate was quieter than I expected.
After everything that happened in the last six hours, the article and Bry’s breakdown and the car chase and mud-splattered news vans and the backroads and the police checkpoint, I half expected to walk through those front doors and find the noise had followed us inside.
That it would be impossible to simply arrive somewhere and have things be still.
But the Willow Estate was still.
The thick stone walls and the blackout curtains and the sheer size of the place conspired to swallow everything whole.
The press was at the gate. I’d seen them when we pulled in, the glint of cameras between the iron slats, but in here you couldn’t hear them.
In here the only sounds were our footsteps on marble and the distant sound of Victoria’s heels moving through rooms she was seeing for the first time in however long.
I watched her move through the entryway and thought about the fact that she’d bought this place for Ryan.
That she’d been maintaining it for fourteen years without living in it.
That she’d walked us all through her front door tonight like it was just a tactical decision, gate and grounds and enough space so the press couldn’t get near it, and I was maybe the only person in the building who understood that it wasn’t just tactical at all.
She was facing something tonight on top of everything else.
And she was doing it the way she did everything.
Without telling a single person it was hard.
When Victoria marched past me, I knew better than to go after her. I wanted to. In some ways, part of me needed to. But she was a determined, stubborn woman. And I knew that once she set her mind to something, there was no deterring her.
So I let her leave to go figure out what the hell we were doing for food.
Though I doubted any of us were hungry.
“Please tell me you’re going to go cook, Mom,” Bry said as her voice came out of the woodworks.
I heard Victoria put on her Mom voice. “Of course I am. I figured I’d make your favorite.”
Bry gasped. “Chicken and dumplings with those roasted apple cider vegetables?”
“The one and only,” Victoria said.
“Then I’ll make my blackberry pie,” Bry said.
“Perfect combination,” Victoria said, their voices retreating in the distance as they made their way closer to the kitchen.
Which meant further away from me.
I jammed my hands into my pockets and decided to take a walk.
I knew what to do with a press gauntlet. I knew what to do with a locker room full of guys after a loss. I knew what to do with a Coach I’d watched walk out of his own home with his shoes untied because his hands had been shaking too hard to manage the laces.
I did not know what to do in this house.
The Willow Estate was the kind of place where you could disappear inside it, which I figured was probably the point.
The marble floors carried sound too far.
I tried to walk quiet, the way I’d walked through my grandmother’s house when I was seven and she was sleeping in the chair again because the chemo had taken everything she had that day.
You learn how to move through a house full of grief young or you don’t learn at all.
I’d learned young.
I passed a sitting room with furniture that looked like nobody had sat on it in a decade.
A library with books that had clearly been read once and then set behind glass like trophies.
A hallway lined with framed photographs that I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at, because I knew exactly who was in them and I knew exactly which woman had been maintaining the frames and dusting the glass and not living in this house for fourteen straight years.
Ryan Caldwell had been gone fourteen years.
That was all I knew. That, and what the team knew, which was that he’d played for the Vipers when they were minor league and coached them before Victoria bought the franchise.
The rest of the story belonged to the woman currently three rooms away, and I’d never asked.
Not Coach. Not Brynn. Not Google. If she wanted me to know, she’d tell me. And if she didn’t, she didn’t.
The math was the part I couldn’t help calculating.
Brynn was twenty-five now. Fourteen years ago she’d been eleven.
Victoria had been twenty-nine. Whatever happened, Victoria had walked through it with a kid still in middle school and a franchise that wasn’t yet hers and a foundation that didn’t yet have a name.
She’d come out the other side with all three.
I didn’t know how.
I stopped in the middle of the hallway and took a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.
There was a photograph at eye level. Her and Ryan.
They had to have been in their early twenties.
Some beach somewhere, his arm around her waist, her hair half in her face from the wind, both of them laughing at something off-camera.
She looked untouched. He looked like a man who would never not come home.
I made myself keep walking.
The thing was, I’d been waiting for this woman for about three damn years before I knew her name.
Not Victoria specifically. The idea of her.
The shape of her. A woman who knew what she was doing and didn’t need me to teach her anything, who could carry her own weight and mine and probably half the room’s if she had to, who walked into a building and the air rearranged itself around her.
I’d been looking for that woman since I was probably fifteen years old, which was the age I figured out my mother wasn’t coming back and started constructing in my head what a woman who DID come back would look like.
I’d built her out of negatives.
She wouldn’t be someone who left.
She wouldn’t be someone who couldn’t be counted on.
She wouldn’t be someone who made promises about birthdays and Christmases and showing up to school plays and then stopped picking up the phone on a Tuesday in March when I was eleven and that was just that.
She wouldn’t be like my mother.
My mother was alive somewhere. That was the part nobody really knew what to do with.
People expected the boy with the mom story to have a dead mom, a tragedy with edges, something they could nod at and then change the subject.
Mine wasn’t dead. Mine just left. She was somewhere in the world right now, breathing air I was also breathing, and I had no idea where, and she had not contacted me in sixteen years, and that was the entirety of the explanation I was ever going to get.
My grandmother had taken me in. My father had been there too, technically.
But my father had been the kind of present that wasn’t present, the kind of man who lived in the same house as you and managed to never quite be in the same room.
He worked. He came home. He drank a beer.
He fell asleep in front of the TV. He drove me to practice when he had to and signed the permission slips when he had to and that was about the depth of what he had to give.
I didn’t blame him. He was carrying his own version of the same hole I was carrying.
He just didn’t have any extra left over for a kid.
My grandmother had the extra.
She’d had me in the kitchen by five learning how to roast a chicken before I could properly hold a knife.
She’d had me sitting through full episodes of Golden Girls reruns at six years old because she said TV was the babysitter she could afford and at least the Golden Girls would teach me how to talk to women.
She’d been right about that too. Half the reason I knew how to read a room full of women was Bea Arthur.
The other half was watching my grandmother handle her own grief at the kitchen table at fifty-eight and never once letting it spill onto me.
She’d died when I was twenty-one. Cancer.
I’d been drafted three months later.
I’d never wanted kids of my own. Not because I disliked them.
I liked plenty of kids. The neighbor’s daughter on my street who waited on her porch to wave at me when I came home from practice.
Jett’s nieces and nephews who treated me like a piece of jungle gym equipment every time they visited.
But the math of it had never added up for me.
I knew what it cost a kid to have a parent who couldn’t show up.
My mother hadn’t shown up. My father had shown up in body and nothing else.
I’d watched what that did to a kid because I’d been that kid.
And I’d promised myself young that if I wasn’t sure I could be the kind of father who came home every single time he said he would, I wasn’t going to roll the dice on a kid’s whole life.
I was sure of a lot of things.
I wasn’t sure of that.
So when I tell you that I’d been waiting for Victoria Caldwell for three years before I met her, when I tell you that I’d been looking for the shape of her since I was fifteen, what I mean is this.
I’d been looking for a woman who knew exactly what it cost to keep showing up.
A woman who’d earned the lines at the corners of her eyes.
A woman who’d buried something and was still standing on her own two feet in heels every morning.
A woman whose daughter was grown and whose chapter on raising a kid was closed, because mine was closed too.
I wasn’t going to give Victoria something she didn’t want.
And she wasn’t going to ask me for something I couldn’t give.
I’d found her.
She was forty-three years old, she was the owner of the team I played for, and she was currently three rooms away making chicken and dumplings for her grown daughter because that was what she did when the world tried to break someone she loved.
She kept feeding them. She kept the house standing. She kept showing up.
I leaned against the wall of her dead husband’s hallway and put my head back against the molding and closed my eyes for one long second.
I was so deeply, stupidly, helplessly in love with her.