Chapter Twenty-Four
Ryleigh
Two Months Later
I’m going to throw up.
Not from nerves, though those are present. Not from the wine I had at halftime, though that’s sloshing around too. I’m going to throw up because the man I love just got hit by someone the size of a refrigerator, and he’s still on the ground, and nobody seems concerned about this except me.
“He’s fine,” Tracey says without looking away from the field. She’s got a beer in one hand and the railing in a death grip with the other. “He gets up. He always gets up.”
“He’s not getting up.”
“Give him a second.”
I count. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three—
Alexei rolls to his knees, shakes his head once, and stands. Pats the guy next to him on the shoulder. Jogs back to formation like nothing happened.
“See?” Tracey takes a sip of her beer. “Fine.”
Nothing about that was fine.
I’m gripping the seat in front of me so hard my knuckles have gone white.
I’m wearing the jersey Alexei bought me—navy and gold, his number on the back—and I’ve sweated through it twice already.
Most of the wives and girlfriends in the suite are dressed similarly.
A few have WIFEY printed across the back.
The sight of it makes my stomach do something I’m not ready to examine.
I almost brought Ella tonight, but Tracey talked me out of it. She’s with Irina, who I’m sure is absolutely glued to the TV right now, probably yelling at it in Russian.
“What just happened?” I ask as the teams reset. Something changed—the energy in the stadium shifted, and everyone around me tensed at the same time.
Valerie leans over. “We’re down by three. Two minutes left. If we score, we win. If we don’t, the season’s over.”
“That’s it? That’s how this works? Just—one play, a few tense seconds, and it’s done?”
“Welcome to football, babe.”
I take a breath that doesn’t quite fill my lungs. This is the championship game. The actual, real, nationally televised championship game, and fifty thousand people are watching, and millions more at home, and my boyfriend is in the middle of it, and I am going to be sick.
Alexei’s sisters are on their feet. Tracey is screaming things that are either very specific football terminology or Russian profanity — possibly both.
I don’t know enough to know. Valerie’s got her hands laced behind her head, pacing the tiny space behind the seats.
Even Ana, the quietest of the three, is muttering under her breath with her eyes closed.
Either she’s praying or she’s casting a spell.
Both seem equally plausible. Whatever will help, honestly.
“Get your head out of your ass, Lex!” Tracey yells toward the field, as if he can hear her through a glass suite thirty rows up.
I stare at the field and find him. Even from up here, he’s unmistakable—the biggest person in a line of enormous people, the way he holds himself, the slight roll of his shoulders before the snap that I’ve learned means he’s locked in.
The stadium goes quiet. Not silent—fifty thousand people can’t be silent—but the roar drops to a hum, everyone holding the same breath. Including me.
Come on. Come on, come on, come on.
The ball snaps. Bodies collide. Alexei shoves through two guys who are trying to get past him, his arms driving forward, his legs churning, and it’s violent and beautiful and terrifying all at once.
I can hear the collisions from up here—or maybe I’m imagining that, but it feels real, the thud of bodies meeting at full speed. I wince, waiting, watching…
Weston heaves the ball. It spirals through the air, arcing under the stadium lights, and the entire suite goes still—Tracey mid-scream, Valerie frozen mid-pace, me with both hands pressed against the glass.
The receiver catches it.
In the end zone.
For one second, nothing happens. Then the stadium detonates. Absolutely explodes.
The noise is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced—not just loud but physical, a wall of sound that vibrates through the glass and the floor and my chest. Tracey screams so hard her voice cracks.
Valerie is jumping, literally jumping, grabbing my arm and shaking me.
Ana has her hands over her face and she’s crying.
“WE WON!” Tracey screams.
“We won?” I’m yelling too, not entirely sure when I started. “We won!”
“WE WON THE WHOLE THING, RY!”
I’m laughing and crying and my hands are shaking, and I don’t fully understand what just happened in football terms, but I understand the scoreboard, and I understand the tears streaming down every face in this suite, and I understand that the man I love just won the biggest game of his career.
On the field, the team swarms together—helmets coming off, guys grabbing each other, jumping, shouting. Confetti starts falling from somewhere, gold and navy, catching the light like glitter. The noise hasn’t stopped. I don’t think it’s going to stop.
I spot Alexei. He’s pulled his helmet off, and even from up here I can see his grin—wide, wild, the kind of smile I’ve only seen glimpses of at home. He hugs Weston, lifting him off the ground, and they’re shouting something at each other I can’t hear.
Then he turns toward the suite.
He’s looking for me. Scanning the rows, the glass, and even from this distance, I feel the moment his eyes find mine.
He gestures with his hand. Get down here.
I don’t remember deciding to move. One second I’m in the suite, the next I’m running down the concrete steps in boots that were not designed for running, pushing past people, flashing the field pass that I didn’t think I’d need, and then I’m through a tunnel and on the sideline, and confetti is falling on my hair and my shoulders, and the grass is bright green under the lights, and Alexei is walking toward me.
He’s sweaty and dirty and grass-stained, his hair matted to his forehead, and he looks like he just went to war, and he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I love him more than I can even comprehend.
“Baby!” His voice cuts through the noise. “Get over here.”
I run. Full-out run across the sideline and into his arms, and he catches me and lifts me off the ground, and we’re laughing and crying at the same time, his face buried in my neck, my legs wrapped around him.
“You did it,” I say into his ear, barely able to hear myself.
“We did.” He pulls back enough to look at me, his hands on my face, his eyes bright and wet. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
He’s looking at me. Really looking—not just a post-game adrenaline look, not the I’m-so-happy look. Something else. Something steadier and more deliberate, deeper, like he’s standing at the edge of something he planned and the moment is finally here.
He sets me down, then he goes down on one knee.
The stadium doesn’t go quiet—it’s way too chaotic for that—but something happens in my brain where the noise just .
. . recedes. Like someone turned the volume knob all the way down, and it’s just him.
Kneeling on the grass in his dirty uniform, holding both my hands, looking up at me with those blue eyes.
My brain stalls.
Wait.
Wait, is he—
He nods to someone behind me. Ana appears—when did Ana get down here?—and places something small in his palm. He closes his fingers around it and looks back up at me.
“I love you,” he says, and his voice is rough and steady and the most certain I’ve ever heard him sound. “You and Ella. I want us to be a family. Not the kind we’ve been playing at—the real kind. The permanent kind.” He squeezes my hands. “Will you marry me?”
I can’t breathe.
I literally cannot pull air into my lungs.
My hands are shaking in his, and my vision is blurry from tears, and somewhere in the background I register that a camera is pointed at us and our faces are on every giant screen in the stadium, but none of that matters because Alexei Ivan is on one knee on a football field asking me to marry him, and two months ago I was standing outside a bar wondering how I was going to make rent.
“Oh my gosh,” I manage. “You’re proposing.”
He grins—that grin, the one with the crinkled eyes. “That was the plan. Win the game. Get the girl.”
“You already had the girl.”
“Then keep her. Forever. Live happily ever after… it’s kind of a whole thing.”
He opens his hand. The ring catches the stadium lights and sparks glimmer—a diamond so big and beautiful that my first, absurd thought is that can’t be real, followed immediately by yes it can, because this man once bought a crib without asking and paid my heating bill behind my back, and if anyone is going to produce a ring like this from thin air on a football field, it’s him.
“What do you say, baby?”
I’m crying. Full-on, mascara-ruining, shoulders-shaking crying, and I don’t care that it’s on camera, and I don’t care that fifty thousand people are watching, and I don’t care about a single thing in the universe except the man on his knee in front of me.
“Yes.” It comes out as barely a whisper, so I say it again, louder. “Yes. Yes, obviously yes.”
The stadium erupts. Louder than the touchdown.
Louder than anything I’ve ever heard. Alexei slides the ring onto my trembling finger and stands, and I throw my arms around his neck, and he lifts me again, spinning me, and the confetti is falling around us like snow, and I’m laughing and sobbing into his neck while fifty thousand strangers cheer.
Oh my gosh.
He kisses me. Not a polite, we’re-on-camera kiss. A real one—his mouth on mine, his hand in my hair, deep and thorough and completely inappropriate for national television, and I kiss him back just as hard because I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it. I care about him. Only him. Forever him.
When we finally pull apart, I’m breathless. “You need a shower.”
“Come with me.”
“Absolutely not.”
He laughs, pressing his forehead against mine. “Worth a shot.”
I look down at my hand. The ring is absurd—massive, sparkling, the kind of ring that makes a statement. My hand is still shaking.
“This is too much,” I say.
He kisses my knuckles. “I wanted you to have the best.”
“Bossy.”
“Always.”
His teammates are closing in—Weston first, pulling Alexei into a hug and then turning to me with this huge grin.
“Welcome to the family, Ry.” Briggs. Tate.
Doug, who looks like he might actually cry.
Even Coach Royce gives me a nod that, from him, qualifies as a full emotional breakdown.
It’s so unexpected that I’m still fighting back tears.
The sisters find me on the field—all three of them, materializing out of the chaos like they planned extraction routes in advance.
Valerie is already crying. Ana keeps grabbing my hand to look at the ring.
Tracey wraps me in a hug so tight I can’t breathe and says, “It’s about damn time,” into my hair.
Alexei has to go—team stuff, locker room, press, the whole post-championship routine—and he kisses me one more time before jogging backward across the field, pointing at me, mouthing something I can’t hear but understand anyway.
I watch him go. His broad back, his teammates clapping him on the shoulders, the way he turns and looks back at me one more time before disappearing into the tunnel.
Then it hits me. All of it. Standing on this field in his jersey with his ring on my finger and confetti in my hair and his sisters around me and his mother watching on TV with our daughter on her lap.
Our daughter.
Two months ago, I was alone. I had nothing. No family, no plan, no hope that things would get better. And then a man I didn’t know stopped on a street corner because he was raised to help, and everything changed.
I bring the ring to my lips and press a kiss against the diamond, tasting salt from my own tears, and Valerie puts her arm around me and says, “Let’s go find some champagne,” and I laugh, and I nod, and I follow my sisters into the crowd.
Andi’s voice drifts through my mind, quiet and sure, the way it sounded in that hospice room the last time I saw her.
Be happy. Don’t let the hard stuff eat the good stuff.
I’m trying, Andi. I’m trying so hard.
And tonight, standing on this field, wearing his name on my back and his ring on my hand, I think I’m finally getting it right.