Chapter 17 #2
The breath I let out embarrasses both of us. She has the grace to be busy with the wrap.
“You’ll want to follow up with Mr. Whitaker tomorrow,” she says, taping the cold pack into place, professional to the last wrap, and then, at the door, she pauses.
One look back — not curious, not judging, just genuine, uncomplicated sympathy, the kind you can’t fake and can’t teach, and it almost undoes me worse than Coach’s sunglasses did.
“Rough day,” she says, like a diagnosis. “They end.”
And she’s gone.
Final tally: pain everywhere with a multi-day forecast, a league fine in the mail with certainty, and a bruised ego with the longest recovery timeline of the three.
Also a note for the file: perhaps don’t start fights with men who have two inches and fifty pounds on you.
Perhaps don’t start fights at all. Perhaps locate the person you were a few weeks ago, coaching eight-year-olds in jeans, and ask him how he did it.
I stay in the medical room and stare at the wall, because I cannot walk into that locker room.
I can’t stand in front of my teammates after another episode of Nate Rivers Burns It All Down, live and censored on national TV.
So the plan is: sit here an hour, let them clear out, change alone in an empty locker room like the empty man Coach diagnosed.
The plan works great for exactly five minutes.
Then the door opens, and my heart rate does something Quinn Abbott would want documented, because Callie Carter walks in and closes the door behind her.
#
Callie
I couldn’t come up with a single believable reason the boys and I shouldn’t go to the game.
Trust me, I tried, I workshopped excuses for a week like a woman preparing false testimony, and every version ended with two shattered little faces, so here we are.
And it’s fine. It’s fine, because I’m not here to talk to Nate or anything.
I’m here to sit in the stands, watch my sons enjoy a football game, and leave. That’s the whole itinerary.
To add insult to injury, both boys want jerseys from the team shop, and both of them want the same one: number 12.
RIVERS across the shoulders. I stand at the register paying actual money for two of them while the universe laughs at me personally, and then I sit between my boys, both wearing the name of the man I’m professionally ignoring, and watch Nate Rivers deliver a masterclass in how not to play quarterback.
He’s awful. Predictable, slow, sacked so many times that somewhere around the sixth one even I start to hurt on his behalf, and I’m supposed to be enjoying this.
I’m shocked Hardin doesn’t bench him, the man must be running on pure hope that Nate will find himself out there.
He doesn’t. And the worst part, the part I keep not looking at directly: I know what his good football looks like now.
I watched him come back from twenty down with my own eyes.
Whatever is out on that field today, it isn’t a slump.
It’s a man playing hollow. And I have a terrible, unwanted suspicion that I know the date the hollowing started.
The clock runs out on the 35–14 embarrassment and we’re shuffling toward the exits when the crowd noise changes, sharpens, turns, and I look back at the field to see two players locked onto each other, and then the jumbotron finds them, and one of them is Nate.
I stop moving. I physically cannot move.
“Mom?” Eli’s looking up at me, concerned, because he’s eight and old enough to understand what’s happening and he has also seen exactly who it is.
Bodies pile in, players, coaches, refs peeling them apart, and even from here, even on the screen, I can see the blood on the side of Nate’s head. And suddenly I am not thinking straight, or at all. I grab a hand in each of mine and I start walking fast, not toward the exit. Toward the tunnel.
I talk my way past the first security guard on pure momentum and press-badge posture. The second one is not buying my improvised nonsense about media access and a VIP pass, and I’m mid-escalation when a voice arrives from behind him.
“Callie Carter?”
The guard steps aside, and there stands Leon Briggs, still in full gear, helmet under one arm, sweat-soaked and enormous, looking at me with unhurried interest. “She’s fine. Let her in.”
The guard melts away.
“Where’s Nate?” I don’t even say thank you. Somewhere my mother is disappointed in me and I will make it up to her later.
“Medical rooms.” He says it like I’m supposed to know where that is, and then he doesn’t move, and I don’t move, and we conduct a brief, silent negotiation over the heads of two boys in matching number 12 jerseys.
His eyes drop to them and something in the enormous face goes soft.
“Hey, guys. Why don’t you two come with me, we’ll get those jerseys signed by the team. ”
Eli and Finn emit a frequency only dogs can fully appreciate.
And I hesitate, hard, because I do not know this man, and I don’t want my kids seeing whatever state Nate is in, but I do not know this man.
All I have is one sentence, from one conversation, in a car that smelled like tacos: Deacon’s reliable. Good people.
“I’m just going to take them to the locker room,” Briggs says, calm as church, reading every one of my calculations off my face and taking no offense at any of them. “I’ve got kids of my own.”
“Mom, please, that would be SO cool.” Finn is levitating.
“I’ll look after him,” Eli says.
Oh, Eli. My serious boy, volunteering as chaperone at eight. One day that sentence is going to stop breaking my heart. Not today.
“Medical rooms are down the hall, on the left,” Briggs says, and before he’s finished the sentence I’m running.
I reach the door as the little blond trainer is coming out, and then I stand in that hallway staring at the handle, conducting the world’s fastest debate.
Walk in, or walk away. And the debate is rigged, because when I saw him bleeding on that screen, something in me simply stopped negotiating.
I can lie to Priya over takeout and to myself over coffee all day long about how the man means nothing, but if the man means nothing, why did I just drag my children through a security checkpoint at a dead run?
I press the handle and walk in.
He’s in better shape than the jumbotron promised.
Bottom lip swollen with a cut in it; the side of his head plastered, blood dried at the edges; an ice pack riding his right hand.
He’s sitting on the medical table like a kid kept after class, and when he sees me his whole face does something undefended that neither of us is ready for.
Neither of us speaks for a few very long moments.