Chapter Thirty-Five #2
The new city took to us faster than either of us expected.
I'd braced for the hard version—two people who'd only ever loved each other in a place full of their own wreckage, trying to find out if the thing survived being transplanted somewhere with no history in it—and instead it turned out the thing had never been about the place.
It was about the daylight, and you can have daylight anywhere.
We found an apartment with bad water pressure and a window that faced east, and I learned the new newsroom and the names of its terrors, and Cade found, within a month, exactly the thing I knew he'd find.
He coaches now. Sixth and seventh graders, a parks-and-rec league in a neighborhood where half the kids' parents work Saturdays, the same shape as the one he'd found back home, because apparently there is no city in this country that doesn't have a field full of kids who need someone to teach them their bodies are worth protecting.
I went to a practice once, early on, stood at the fence in his stolen hoodie and watched the man who used to put grown adults in the ground crouch down to a kid's level and show him, slow and patient, how to keep his head up so he wouldn't get hurt—head up, eyes up, you protect the most important thing first, always, you hear me, that part's not negotiable—and I had to leave before practice ended, because I was doing the thing I do now where my eyes go and I can't make them stop, because I knew exactly which kid he was really talking to, and it was an eleven-year-old in a state three hundred miles away who'd never once been told that his head was worth keeping up.
"You okay?" he asked, after, finding me at the truck.
"The subject was observed coaching children and found devastating," I said, into his chest. "No further questions."
?
Theo's doing better than any of us, which I love, which I find perfect.
He never got the leg back the way it was—that draft, that life, that's gone, the way they took it.
But it turns out a guy who spent four years being the most respected voice in a locker room and then became the bravest one in the country has options nobody put on a recruiting board.
He's doing media now. Real media—not the polished kind, the true kind, a podcast that turned into a column that turned into a job, where former players talk about the parts nobody let them say while they were playing.
He calls me for advice sometimes, on how to get a scared man to talk, and I tell him the same thing every time: buy him a coffee and ask how he's actually doing, and then shut up and mean it, and he says yeah, yeah, I learned that one from a girl with a recorder, and we both pretend we're not getting choked up about it long distance.
He came to visit last month. Walked off the plane on two legs, no crutch, a slight thing in his gait you'd only catch if you'd watched him scream on a field once, and he hugged me so hard he picked me up, and he shook Cade's hand and then said come here, you idiot and hugged him too, the two of them enormous and graceless in our doorway, and over dinner he said the thing I think about still: "You know what they took from me?
Football. A leg. Four years. You know what they couldn't take?
This. Whatever this is. The three of us at a table.
Turns out that was never on the table they were setting.
It was always ours." He lifted his water. "To the stuff they couldn't take."
We drank to the stuff they couldn't take.
Miles called in the middle of it, on speaker, loud and beloved and graduating in the spring, threatening to come visit and finally see this apartment everyone keeps describing, and Brielle texted a photo of her own alphabetized spice rack with the caption I CAUGHT IT FROM YOU, THIS IS YOUR FAULT, and the table was full, three states from where any of it started, of a family none of us were born into and all of us chose.
?
He asked me to marry him in the most Cade way possible, which is to say without a single word, because the man spent twenty-two years unable to talk and now overcorrects by occasionally letting the biggest things happen in silence, the way they used to be safe.
We were on the couch. The one we'd argued about buying.
He'd been quiet all evening, the good quiet, not the wall quiet—I know the difference now, I can read him like a story I wrote—and at some point he just reached over and took my left hand and held it, and looked at it, and looked at me, and there was a ring in his other hand, simple, nothing flashy, a thing he'd clearly agonized over in a way that wrecked me, and he didn't say will you, he just raised his eyebrows, this enormous terrified gentle man, asking the biggest question of his life the only way the kid inside him knew how, which was to risk being seen wanting something and trust that the sky wouldn't fall.
"You have to say it," I told him, crying already, the absolute worst, no composure, a professional question-asker undone by a man who wouldn't ask the question. "I'm a reporter. I need it on the record."
"Marry me," he said. Out loud. On the record.
His voice shaking the way it had on the steps in the rain, a man who'd learned to make a sound and would never go quiet again.
"I lose everything I love, I told you that once.
It's the one thing I used to be reliable about.
And then I didn't lose you—I almost did, I tried to, I called you the worst thing I could think of and you protected me anyway—and I figured out the thing isn't that I lose what I love.
It's that I'd never let myself love anything I couldn't afford to lose.
And I can't afford to lose you. Not even a little.
You'd ruin me. So I want to make it official, on paper, with both our names on it where everyone can see, the most on-the-record thing two people can do. Marry me. Please. In the daylight."
I said yes the way I do everything, first, on my own terms, before he'd finished, kissing the rest of the sentence off his face—and somewhere a man who'd been told his whole life that boys like him don't get to have things got to have the biggest one there is, out loud, in the light, with a witness who'd waited her whole life to be his.
We're not telling my mother till she visits.
I want to see her face. I think she'll cry, the rare kind.
I think she'll look at the ring and at him and understand, finally and all the way, that the knife she gave me and the love I found weren't enemies after all, that I got to keep both, that she was wrong about the one thing she most wanted to be wrong about.
I'm telling you about the paperwork because I'm stalling, because the actual point of this epilogue is that I'm currently standing in a kitchen that is half mine, wearing a shirt that is entirely Cade's, watching a man do the dishes in a way that should not be as devastating as it is.
We got an apartment. Together. In the daylight. On a lease with both our names on it, which felt, after a whole year of hiding, like its own kind of vow.
"You're staring," he said, not turning around.
"I'm reporting," I said. "Observing the subject in his natural habitat."
"The subject knows you're checking him out."
"The subject is doing dishes shirtless and cannot prove intent."
He turned around then, and he had that look, the one I'd spent a year earning, the one with no wall behind it at all, just the kid all grown up and entirely mine, and he crossed the kitchen slow—he always came to me slow now, he'd never unlearned letting me choose, and I'd never stopped loving him for it—and he backed me up against the counter with his hands on either side of me and his mouth at my ear and said, low, "Then let me give you a quote. "
?
I'll spare you the full transcript. Some things stay off the record even from the reader.
But I'll tell you he kissed me like the first time and the hundredth time at once, careful and then not, the contrast that has never once stopped undoing me, his hands learning a map they'd long since memorized, and I pulled him in by the waistband the way I'd pulled at his hoodie in a newspaper office a lifetime ago, and he laughed against my mouth—he laughs constantly now, it's a problem, it's the best problem—and lifted me onto the counter like I weighed nothing, like his back had never been a war, because it isn't one anymore, because he finally let someone fix the thing he used to hide.
He took his time. He always took his time now; we had it, finally, all the time in the world and a door that locked and no rule to break because we'd burned the rule down in the rain.
He whispered things against my skin that I'd have once needed to write down to believe, and I said his name like the confession it had always secretly been, and somewhere in the middle of it, with the late sun coming through a window in an apartment that was ours, I had the thought I keep having lately, the one that still surprises me:
This is the thing they said he couldn't have. And he's having it. With his whole chest. In the daylight. On purpose.
Afterward we lay tangled on a couch we'd bought together, arguing about, my head on the heartbeat I still navigate by, his fingers tracing slow lines down my arm, and the evening went gold and easy around us, and neither of us reached for a phone.
"I love you," he said, into my hair. He says it constantly too. Out loud. On the record. Like a man making up for twenty-two years of silence and enjoying every second of the interest.
"I know," I said. "You keep telling me. It's very on-brand for a man who couldn't talk."
"I contain multitudes now. You did this to me. You're responsible." He pressed his mouth to the top of my head. "Print it."
"Already did," I said. "It's a hell of a quote."
?
The doorbell rang at seven, which is how I know to end this story, because the doorbell is the next one starting.
It was Jaxon Holt.
He's doing well, Jaxon—better than well, actually.
When the dust settled he was the most famous whistleblower in college football, the golden boy who lit the match, and the irony is that the thing that was supposed to end his career made it.
He got drafted. He's a backup somewhere warm now, polished and beloved and, when you catch him at the right angle, still just slightly somewhere else behind his eyes, like a man who told one enormous truth and is realizing he's got a few more left in him.
He came in, hugged me, fist-bumped Cade, accepted a beer, and sat down on our new couch looking like a man who'd driven a long way to not say something.
"So," he said, finally. "I need a favor. Reporter favor. Off the record. Maybe on the record, I don't know yet, that's kind of the problem."
Cade and I looked at each other.
"There's a woman," Jaxon said, and then immediately looked like he regretted starting the sentence, the most un-Jaxon expression I'd ever seen on his media-trained face.
"Okay. There's a— it's complicated. She's a— she works for the league office.
The league office. Which is a problem, because what I'm sitting on is the kind of thing that ends careers, mine included, and she's the exact wrong person to be—" He dragged a hand down his face.
"I came here because you two are the only people I know who figured out how to be on opposite sides of something impossible and not let it—" He gestured at us, the apartment, the lease, the whole improbable on-the-record life of it.
"How'd you do it? How do you fall for the one person you're absolutely not supposed to? "
I looked at Cade. Cade looked at me. We both, I am not ashamed to say, started to laugh.
"Oh," I said, reaching for my recorder out of pure muscle memory, the old hunger waking up in me, sharp and bright and delighted. "Jaxon. Sweetheart. Sit back. Have we got a story for you."
Outside, the lights of the new stadium were coming on against the dark, the way they do every Saturday, the way they always will, indifferent and beautiful, throwing their glow over a town that had learned, the hard way, the difference between a thing that cheers for you and a thing that loves you.
And somewhere in it, a quarterback who was secretly tired of being perfect had just walked into exactly the kind of trouble that makes the best stories.
But that, as they say, is illegal contact of an entirely different kind.
And it's a whole other book.
The End