1. Tyler
TYLER
The house is too quiet.
I've been telling myself that's fine. Quiet is fine.
Quiet means nobody's disappointed in you, nobody's watching you fail, nobody's waiting for you to do the thing you always end up doing.
I've had a lot of practice being alone in the last year, and I'm getting better at it—almost comfortable, even.
It's eight in the morning, and I'm forty push-ups into a workout I don't particularly want to do, palms flat against the hardwood floor of my rental's living room. Sweat drips down my temples. The ceiling fan clicks overhead, once every few rotations, the same way it did yesterday and the day before. I still haven’t fixed it.
Off-season mornings are like this. The empty hours have to be filled with something, so I fill them with workouts, meal prep, and the discipline of not thinking too hard about anything.
Training camp doesn't start for another three weeks.
Three more weeks of this specific kind of stillness, just me, the quiet, the ceiling fan, and the two spare bedrooms full of unopened boxes I haven't touched since I moved in.
It's not that I don't know what's in them.
It's that unpacking feels like deciding to stay, and I haven't figured out yet if that's something I'm doing or just something that's happening to me.
I don't know what I was thinking, renting a three-bedroom. I think some version of me believed that having the space would eventually make me want to fill it. That version of me was wrong about a lot of things.
Fifty push-ups. My arms shake on the last five. I collapse onto my back, chest heaving, and stare up at the fan.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
It’s been a year in Ridgeport, and this place still doesn't feel like anything, which I've decided is probably the best I can hope for. Not good, not bad. Just walls, a roof, and a mortgage's worth of rent every month. I stopped waiting for it to feel like home somewhere around March.
I reach for my water bottle, but my fingers find empty air.
The doorbell rings.
I lift my head off the floor. It's probably the resistance bands I ordered last week.
I've been getting lots of packages lately, mostly things I don't need, because ordering things online is something to do in the evenings when the quiet gets loud enough to notice.
Signing a pro contract means you can fill a house with things you don't need and barely notice the dent.
I roll to my feet, grab the towel off the couch, scrub it across my face, and yank a t-shirt on as I head for the door.
The bell rings again.
"Coming," I call out.
I swing the door open, already looking down, expecting cardboard.
Instead, there's a baby carrier on my doorstep.
I go very still.
It's an infant car seat, with a curved handle, a fabric canopy pulled halfway down, and a soft pink blanket tucked inside.
Inside the blanket is a baby. She's screaming, full-throated and furious, the kind of sound that cuts right through whatever careful numbness you've been cultivating for the past eleven months.
"What the fuck?" I breathe.
I look up and down the street. There’s no car pulling away.
No frantic parent doubling back up the path.
Just my quiet neighborhood in the morning sun, indifferent to the screaming infant on my welcome mat, as if this were normal, as if people's lives just detonate on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday in August all the time.
My hands are shaking when I crouch down. There's an envelope taped to the side of the carrier, my name written across the front in handwriting I don't recognize.
Tyler.
My stomach drops through the floor.
I rip it open, and there’s a single sheet of paper inside, folded once.
Tyler, her name is Harper. She's yours. I can't do this. I'm sorry. – Jessica
The world doesn't tilt. It just stops.
There's a second piece of paper underneath the note, thicker, official-looking. A birth certificate, with the state seal in the corner.
Harper Rose West. Born June 1st.
Mother: Jessica Torres. Father: Tyler West.
She was born two months ago. Which means that nine months before that was September.
Which also means that she belongs to the woman with the tired eyes and the vodka tonic from the dive bar with the sticky floors, who left a note the next morning.
Which means the one night I wrote off as forgettable was apparently the opposite of that.
"Oh god," I say to nobody. "Oh fuck."
Harper screams louder, her tiny face scrunching up like she's personally furious at the universe for the situation it has put her in.
Honestly? Same.
I look up and down the street one more time, half-convinced someone's about to jump out and explain this all to me, but the street stays empty, and the baby stays real.
I pick up the carrier handle with both hands—nearly dropping it when the weight pulls my arm down—adjust my grip, and haul her inside.
I set her on the living room floor as far from my dumbbells as possible, which is the only rational thought I'm capable of at this moment. She's tiny—genuinely, incomprehensibly tiny. Her fists are clenched, her face is turning red, her cries are sharp and relentless, and I have no idea what to do.
"Okay," I tell her. "It's okay. You're okay."
She is very clearly not okay.
Food. Babies need food. I go to the kitchen and open the fridge, which consists of protein shakes, leftover pizza, two beers, and something that might have been yogurt two weeks ago. Nothing appropriate for a two-month-old. I close the fridge. Open it again. Close it.
Diapers. I remember from somewhere that babies need diapers.
I go back to the living room, and that's when I see it: the front door is still open, and just outside on the porch is a diaper bag I completely missed, black and worn, and shoved off to the side.
I was too busy staring at the baby to notice it.
I grab it, kick the door shut hard enough that the frame rattles, and don't breathe properly until the deadbolt clicks.
I dump the bag onto the floor: diapers, wipes, bottles, formula, and a handful of other items I can't identify fall out. I pick up what looks like the most urgent thing and try to figure out the diaper situation.
It turns out—and I say this as a professional athlete who has trained through torn ligaments and played with cracked ribs—changing a diaper is very fucking hard.
I unbuckle Harper from the carrier with hands that won't stop trembling, trying to support her head the way I've vaguely seen people do in movies.
She's warm and solid and real, and she screams directly into my face when I pick her up.
I lay her on the floor and fumble with the snaps on her onesie.
There are so many snaps. An unreasonable number of snaps for a garment this small.
I get the diaper off. Put the new one on backward. Realize it. Swear. Try again. And by the time I finish, there's pee on the hardwood, I've used most of the wipe packet, and Harper hasn't stopped crying for a single second.
"Food," I say, my voice coming out rough. "You need food."
The formula instructions might as well be in a foreign language.
Ounces and scoops and something about boiling water and temperatures, which I don't have time for because she is screaming right now.
I read the whole thing twice, retain nothing useful, and use tap water because it's there and it's fast. The powder clumps.
I shake the bottle harder, and the formula goes everywhere: over the counter, my hands, my shirt.
I test the temperature on my wrist like I've seen someone do once in a film, and realize I have absolutely no frame of reference for what I'm feeling.
I pick Harper up again, terrified of the wrong angle, the wrong grip; every small movement is a potential disaster. I guide the bottle to her mouth. She turns her head away. Her cries get louder.
"Please," I say. It comes out cracked. "Please. Just eat."
I try again. And again after that.
By nine-thirty, I'm covered in formula, Harper is covered in spit-up, and we are both crying—which is not something I planned on doing today—but here we are.
By ten, I've changed her twice more, walked about forty laps around the living room, and tried three different bottles; nothing has worked.
My arms are shaking, and not from the push-ups.
My throat is doing something I can only describe as a variety of panic that feels like grief.
I set her back into the carrier as carefully as I can, make sure she's secure, and stand up. I press both hands over my face. I'm going to drop her. That thought, quiet and certain. I'm going to drop her. I'm going to ruin this the way I've ruined everything. She deserves better than whatever I am.
I pull my phone out of my pocket.
There is exactly one person I can call. The fact that I have any right to call her at all is a grace I know I didn't earn. I dial before I can talk myself out of it.
She picks up on the second ring.
"Hey, Tyler. What's up?"
Her voice is the same as it always is. Warm. Steady. Like she doesn't notice—or has decided not to notice—everything I put her through.
"Em." My voice breaks clean in half. "I need help. Please."