Chapter Ten
Alexei
Seven days. That’s how long I’ve known her.
Seven days ago, I was walking home from dinner with my agent, bored and restless, and now I’m standing in my closet debating which T-shirt says I’m a responsible man who should definitely be trusted with someone else’s baby at a professional football meeting.
The drive to the facility takes twenty minutes, and I spend every one of them in a mood so good it’s almost embarrassing.
Ella’s in the back seat, content, working her pacifier like it’s a full-time job. The radio’s low. I’m tapping the steering wheel at red lights because everything feels lighter this morning, and I know exactly why.
I can’t stop thinking about Ryleigh.
She talks to Ella in this low voice like they’re planning something, and I’ve stood in the hallway listening more times than I’ll ever admit.
She’s stubborn to a degree that should be annoying and is instead one of my favorite things about her.
She works harder than guys I know who get paid millions to push their bodies to the limit.
She took in a baby that isn’t hers because nobody else stepped up, and she hasn’t complained about it once. Not once.
She told me this morning that her life is a mess and she’s not ready for whatever this is, and then she kissed me in the kitchen like she was trying to prove herself wrong.
I know it’s fast. I know if a buddy told me this story, I’d tell him to slow down. But I don’t want to slow down. I want to drive home after this meeting and find her in my kitchen in my T-shirt, humming that same off-key song, and I want every morning to feel exactly like this one did.
I pull into the lot, grab the carrier and the diaper bag, and head inside.
Doug’s coming out of the weight room. He stops when he sees me. Looks at Ella. Looks at me.
“Is that a baby?”
“Yep.”
“Whose baby?”
“Long story.”
The meeting room is half full when I walk in. There’s about a dozen guys, Coach Royce, two assistants, game film on the projector. The second I step through the door with a car seat in my hand, every single conversation stops.
Twelve heads turn at once.
“Morning,” I say, like this is perfectly normal.
Three seconds of silence.
Then Weston: “Bro. What?”
I set the carrier on the table and angle it so Ella can see the room. She scans the group—twelve very large men staring at her—with the composure of someone who’s been doing this her whole life. Pacifier working. Eyes calm. Not a sound.
“This is Ella,” I say. “She’s sitting in.”
Coach has his arms crossed. “Ivan.”
“Coach.”
“That’s a baby.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In my meeting room.”
“She’s very well-behaved.”
The vein in his forehead surfaces. He looks at me, looks at Ella. She blinks at him once, slow and unbothered. Something in his expression shifts—barely—before he catches himself.
“She yours?” he asks.
“No. Just helping out.”
He considers this and then nods. “One sound and you’re both gone.”
“Understood.”
I sit down. Ella pops her pacifier out, considers it, puts it back in, and closes her eyes.
Perfect angel. Better composure than half the guys in here.
Film runs forty-five minutes. My blown coverage in the second quarter gets highlighted. The late rotation in the fourth. I nod, take notes, own it. The whole time, I feel the glances—guys half-watching the screen and half-watching me, trying to work out the math on the baby.
Ella sleeps through the entire thing.
Coach dismisses us. I start packing up.
“Ivan.” Weston’s already in the seat beside me. “We’re talking about this.”
I check Ella’s straps. “About what?”
“About the baby at the team meeting, man.”
Briggs walks over. Then Tate. Then Doug, hovering at the edge of the group like he’s been waiting for this exact moment.
“Whose kid?” Briggs asks.
I give them the version I’m willing to share. Street corner, late at night. A woman named Ryleigh whose roommate left her with a baby and disappeared. Broken heat in her apartment. She’s staying at my place while she figures things out.
That’s all they get. They don’t get last night. They don’t get this morning.
When I finish, nobody says anything for a beat.
“So you met a girl,” Briggs says, “brought her home, and now she’s living with you and you’re watching her kid.”
“It’s more complicated than that.” It’s not even her kid, for starters.
“I’m sure it is. How long have you known her?”
No point stretching it. “Seven days.”
The silence shifts into something heavier.
“Seven days,” Weston repeats. “She’s in your penthouse. After seven days.”
Heat pricks the back of my neck. “The situation called for it.”
“What situation?”
“The one where her apartment had no heat and she had a two-month-old baby. That situation.”
Weston holds up his hands. “I’m not attacking you. I’m just pointing out that this is . . . a lot.”
Tate pulls a chair around and sits across from me. Ten years in the league, married, two kids, the closest thing this team has to a voice of reason. When Tate talks, people listen. Including me.
“Ivan. Where does this woman work?”
I rub the back of my neck. “She’s a waitress.”
“Where?”
“Does it matter?”
“It might.”
I exhale. “Shimmer.”
Quiet. The wrong kind of quiet. Briggs runs a hand over his face. Weston stares at the ceiling and releases a slow, pained breath.
“The place on Rush Street,” Tate says.
“She’s a waitress, Tate. She works there because it pays. She wants to be a teacher—she had two years of college on scholarship before her parents died and she lost everything. She’s not—”
“Nobody’s judging her job.” His voice is level, and I believe him. “I’m talking about what this looks like from the outside. To the front office. To the press. To anyone who cares about how Alexei Ivan is spending his time during the biggest contract year of his career.”
That lands. I don’t have a quick response for it.
“You’re in the middle of a thirty-million-dollar negotiation,” Tate continues.
“Your agent’s been building this for months.
The organization is watching everything you do.
And you’ve moved in a woman nobody here has met, with a baby that has no legal custody arrangement, and you’re bringing that baby to team meetings.
” He pauses. “I like you, Ivan. That’s why I’m saying this. ”
Something inside my stomach sinks. “I know.”
“Have you told Slate?” Weston asks.
“No.”
“He needs to know.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“When?”
I don’t answer because when I think about calling my agent and telling him about this… yeah. It’s not going to go well.
Doug, who’s been uncharacteristically quiet, clears his throat. “Can I just say one thing?”
Everyone looks at him.
“My cousin dated a girl for three weeks, moved her in, and she cleaned out his apartment while he was at his mom’s birthday party. Took the TV, the couch, his dog. The fucking dog, man.”
“That’s . . . not helpful, Doug.”
“I’m just saying. People aren’t always what they seem.”
Tate nods, not at Doug specifically, but at the general point. “Nobody’s calling this woman a con artist. We’re saying you don’t have enough information yet to be sure she isn’t one. A week isn’t enough time to know someone. It’s enough time to like someone. Those are different things.”
The words hit harder than anything else that’s been said. Because he’s drawing a clean, precise line between what I feel and what I know, and when I look at it honestly—really honestly—the feel column is overflowing and the know column is thin.
I know she cried in my shower that first night and thought I couldn’t hear.
I know she tried to pay me back with eggs.
I know she fights me on every dollar because depending on someone makes her feel like she’s failing.
I know she could have left Ella at a fire station and walked away, and she didn’t.
But Tate’s right. I don’t know her middle name.
I don’t know where she grew up. I don’t know what she was like before the accident, before the grief, before everything fell apart.
I’ve seen who she is under pressure, and it’s impressive, but I haven’t seen who she is when things are normal.
I don’t even know what normal looks like for her.
“I hear you,” I say, and I mean it this time. “All of you.”
“That’s all we’re asking,” Briggs says. “Just be smart.”
I pick up Ella’s carrier and the diaper bag.
She hasn’t stirred through any of it—sleeping with her fist curled against her cheek, her mouth still working around the pacifier.
Peaceful. Oblivious to a room full of men questioning whether the woman who feeds her and sings to her and holds her at 2 a.m. is someone who can be trusted.
“See you Thursday,” I say.
The hallway is long and bright and quiet. I push through the doors into the parking garage, and the cold air hits me, and the mood I drove in with is completely gone.
I strap Ella into the back seat. Close the door gently. Sit behind the wheel.
Don’t start the car.
My hands find the steering wheel and just grip. The garage is concrete gray and cold, and the only sound is Ella’s soft breathing from the back seat.
If one of them came to me with this story—met a girl, she moved in with me, there’s a baby—I’d have said everything they just said. Every word. Slow down. Be careful. You don’t know enough yet.
But they don’t know Ryleigh. They don’t know the way she presses her face into Ella’s hair when she thinks nobody’s watching. They don’t know how hard she works, or how much she cares.
That’s not a game. You can’t fake that kind of stuff.
Can you?
The doubt doesn’t crash in. It creeps. Through the cracks, the edges, the spaces between what I feel and what I can prove.
What if I’m wrong? What if the tenderness and the chemistry are fogging something I should see clearly?
What if Tate can see it from the outside because he’s not standing in the middle of it the way I am?
Seven days isn’t enough to know someone. Tate’s right about that.
But it’s enough to know that I want to.
I start the car and drive home. The radio stays off. I don’t need noise right now.
I need to think.