Chapter 4
THEO
I have no idea what happened to me. A year ago, I was spending my off-season island hopping through Hawaii with my brother and a couple of our teammates.
Now, I’m sitting on the edge of my brother’s pool wearing inflatable water wings around my wrists like bracelets. His wife’s nieces are making me a crown out of the white clover flowers that have taken over Carter’s yard, so I’m not allowed to move until they’re finished.
I guess the girls are technically Carter’s nieces now too, but his marriage to Sarah is still so new, I sometimes forget about his status as an uncle.
“Just one more,” Poppy says as she carefully ties another flower stem to her ever-growing chain.
“I do one,” Olive says from beside her, but Poppy nudges her little sister away.
“You’ll break it,” she says. She lifts the flowers in front of me. “Finished.”
I tilt my head forward. “All right. Let’s see how it looks.”
Poppy gently drapes the flowers across the top of my head, then takes a step back to assess her work. She folds her arms across her chest, lifting one hand to her chin like she’s giving me very serious consideration.
I press my lips together to keep myself from laughing. The way her mouth is all scrunched up, she looks just like her aunt. Sarah does the same thing when she steps back from the easel to study her work.
“You look very handsome,” Poppy finally declares.
“Thanks, Pops.”
“Girls!” Sarah calls from the patio behind us. “Want some watermelon?”
I lift my arm, making sure Olive doesn’t fall in the pool as she hurries after her sister.
“The water wings are a nice touch,” my brother says as he sits down beside me, dropping his feet into the water. He hands me a beer. “Looks like you finally won them over.”
I chuckle as I wriggle my wrists out of the water wings. On my left hand, the plastic tugs at my scar, and a twinge of pain shoots up my wrist. I massage the area gently, flexing my fingers once or twice for good measure.
From the outside, it looks like my hand is completely healed.
And it’s definitely better than it was. But every so often, a nerve will misfire, and suddenly I’m dealing with anything from mild discomfort to white-hot pain radiating up my arm.
It’s frustrating, but my physical therapist insists that dealing with neuropathic pain is better than feeling nothing at all.
Either way, I’ve never spent so much time considering how much my hands impact my gameplay, how the pads of my thumbs make all the difference to my stick handling.
I take a long swig of beer. “They probably just think I’m you,” I say to my brother.
“Nah, that’s definitely not it,” he says with a good-natured grin. “They love me too much to make that kind of mistake.” He nods toward my hand. “Are you hurting?”
“Nah. It’s fine,” I lie. “Not half as bad as it used to be.” I’m not sure why I don’t want Carter to know I’m still dealing with nerve pain. Maybe because he and the rest of the team expect me to be back when the season starts, and I’m not ready to consider the possibility that I won’t be.
Carter sets his beer on the pool deck before lifting his sunglasses and pushing them into his hair.
He looks tired, but that’s hardly surprising.
He and Sarah have been babysitting for Sarah’s brother, Miles, and his wife, Anna, all weekend.
Their youngest is only four months old, so the parents didn’t go far.
Just down to Oakley Island for a couple of days.
But three kids for any amount of time is more than I could handle. I have no idea how Carter does it.
When my brother married into our team captain’s family, I was surprised by how easily he adapted to having a larger inner circle, including three kids, aged six and under.
But he’s clearly a natural. He even carries his youngest niece, Fiona, around like it’s no big deal to have a football-sized human in his hands. Which is good because he might be our mom’s only chance at grandchildren.
I glance to where my phone is sitting on a lounge chair behind me.
It’s been a week since I saw Becca in the parking garage of Atlanta General.
Long enough that I’m no longer actively looking at my phone every two and a half minutes wondering if she’s going to text.
But hanging out with Carter, seeing the reminders of just how blissfully happy he is in his new married life, it makes the sting of her not texting a little more potent.
Not that I have any hope of marriage when it comes to Becca. My therapist made it clear I was setting myself up for failure if my expectations extended anywhere past wanting to apologize.
It was solid advice. Grounded in reality. And I assured Dr. Michaels he didn’t have anything to worry about. I only wanted to clear the air.
But then I saw her.
Blue scrubs, hair piled on top of her head, eyes heavy after a long day, but still looking impossibly beautiful. The moment she appeared, all those feelings I thought I’d put behind me came crashing back with the force of a semi-truck.
She was the same in so many ways, but she was also more.
More grown up. More settled into herself.
I found myself itching to pull her into my arms, to take her somewhere to talk, to ask her a million questions.
Everything I missed. All the moments that led her to working in a hospital so far away from home.
Behind us, the patio door opens, then a streak of red hair comes flying across the pool deck.
“Here I come, here I come, here I come!” Charlie calls, then she cannonballs into the water directly between Carter and me.
“Charlotte Hollifield,” Holly says from the door, arms full of beach towels and a glittery pink backpack. “Get back over here. You don’t have any sunscreen on yet.”
Charlie looks up at me, eyes sparking with rebellious glee, then takes off in the opposite direction, swimming remarkably well for someone so tiny.
Carter quickly jumps into the water and catches her by the swimsuit strap. “Not so fast,” he says, pulling her up short.
She lets out an indignant huff, arms and legs still flailing like tiny propellers despite her lack of progress. “Let me go! I don’t need sunscreen.”
“Pretty sure you do, kiddo,” Carter says.
Charlie looks over to me. “Help me, Uncle Theo.”
Three months ago, I’m not sure Charlie would have felt comfortable calling on me for help.
Carter and I have been close to her dad since we started with the Jaguars.
We lived with him and his late wife, Claire, for a few months right after we moved to Atlanta.
But even before he became an uncle, Carter has been better with kids than I am.
“You just have to be present,” he told me once. “Stop thinking about what you could be doing instead and enjoy the moment in front of you.”
It was good advice, and I’ve been making more of an effort. I’ll never be the favorite for Poppy or Olive or Fiona, but there’s still a chance with Charlie.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” I say to her. “If you dry off and put some sunscreen on, then when you’re back in the water, I’ll throw you into the deep end six times.”
She scrunches up her forehead. “How about ten times?”
“Deal,” I say, then Carter launches her toward the pool stairs. She glides to a stop—she really is a good swimmer—and climbs toward her dad, who is waiting for her, towel held open.
“I like your crown, Uncle Theo,” Charlie says as Holly dries her off. “But you should take it off before you get in the water.”
I completely forgot about my crown, and the look on Holly’s face says he finds it highly amusing that I’m wearing one. Not that he has any room to talk. The last time we worked out together, he showed up to the gym with purple fingernails.
Beckett Hollifield might be one of the most impenetrable goalies in the NHL, but he’s a big softy when it comes to his daughter.
Apparently, I am too, because I end up tossing Charlie into the deep end at least twenty times instead of the ten she negotiated. Before long, Poppy and Olive come back outside, and suddenly I’m a human jungle gym, a little girl hanging off each of my arms and another clinging to my neck.
It’s Sarah who eventually comes to my rescue.
“Okay, girls,” she calls from the side of the pool. “Time to come inside. If you’re quick getting into dry clothes, we can watch a movie before dinner.”
“But we want to keep swimming,” Poppy says. “Theo can stay with us.”
“Theo needs some grown-up time with his teammates, which means you turkeys have to leave him alone,” Sarah says. “Now, come on. First one to the couch gets to pick the movie.”
That kicks the older girls into gear, and they scramble to the stairs and head for the house. I walk Olive, who is too little to make it on her own, over to the edge of the pool where Sarah lifts her out of my arms and wraps her up in a towel.
“You’re a good sport,” she says as she squeezes the water out of Olive’s hair.
“Nah, they make it easy,” I say.
She eyes me, like it isn’t quite the answer she expected, and her expression softens. “Are you staying for dinner? It won’t be fancy. Probably just pizza.”
“Sure,” I say. “Sounds good.”
She nods, then carries Olive inside.
I hoist myself out of the pool, then grab my towel and phone from the chair where I left them and head over to where Carter and Holly are sitting in the shade.
Next to Carter, Fiona is stretched out in a stroller thing, sound asleep.
Carter has one hand on the handle and is slowly rolling it forward and back.
I drop into a seat across from my brother and scroll through my notifications.
“Did Mom try to call you?” I ask, and he glances at his own phone.
“I haven’t heard from her. You?”
“Three times,” I say, suddenly wondering if I should be worried. She’s not normally so persistent unless something’s up. Though she would have tried Carter as well if there were a true emergency. But then I check my text messages.
“Is she okay?” Carter asks, voice tinged with concern.
“She’s fine,” I grumble. “She texted. She was just checking in.”