37. Scottie-girl
Scottie-girl
When we step through the door, the silence in the room is total, except for the high, clear whistle of an oxygen concentrator sitting near the window.
There’s a woman sitting in the vinyl armchair by the radiator.
She’s small—much smaller than I expected for someone who managed to produce a six-foot-three professional athlete—with short, curling gray hair and a navy blue cardigan that looks like it’s been washed a thousand times.
She has a book open on her lap, but her thumbs are just spinning around each other, a quiet, repetitive motion that tells me she’s been in this chair since the middle of the night.
“Mom,” Cash says.
His voice is different. It’s not the rumble he uses with me, or the sharp, confident bark he gives the defensemen from the crease.
It’s the voice of a boy who just walked into a kitchen with a scraped knee, looking for the one person in the world who can make it hurt less.
The woman looks up. Her eyes are the exact same shade of brown as Cash’s, but they’re surrounded by a network of fine, deep lines that speak to decades of worry and laughter.
She doesn’t cry. She just lets out a long breath that deflates her small chest, her book sliding off her knees onto the floor as she stands up.
“Oh, Finnian,” she whispers.
She reaches him in three steps, her small, thin arms going around him. Cash drops his head onto her shoulder, his entire frame going loose all at once, his knees bending just enough to let her hold his weight.
They stay like that for a long time—the giant and the small woman, silhouetted against the gray morning light coming through the blinds.
Over her shoulder, I can see the bed.
Matthew O’Connell is a big man—you can see the frame of the shoulders that Cash inherited—but the skin on his face is pulled tight against the bone, dry and yellow like old parchment.
There is a clear plastic tube hooked into his nose, his mouth slightly open as his chest hitches under the scratchy hospital cotton.
His eyes are open, staring at the ceiling tile with a flat, milky focus that doesn’t move when the door clicks closed.
Cash’s mom pulls back from his chest, her hands staying flat against his ribs as she looks up at him.
“The doctors say the fever is coming down, but his lungs… they’re very tired, Finn,” she says, her voice as steady as she can make it.
“He walked all the way down to the old trolley tracks. He thought he was meeting your Uncle Jimmy after the night shift at the yard. Jimmy’s been gone since ninety-eight. ”
She turns her eyes to me then.
There’s no suspicion in them, no professional curiosity about why her son’s high-priced sports agent is standing in her husband’s hospital room at six in the evening wearing an oversized black hoodie and dirt-streaked sneakers.
She just looks at me with that deep, simple kindness that makes my throat feel like it’s full of dry sand.
“You must be Scottie,” she says, reaching out to take my hand. “Finn told me about you.”
I try to find the standard, polished cadence that usually carries me through corporate crises—the tone that reassures anxious team owners and establishes boundaries with a single, professional breath.
I try to remember that I am Scottie Reed, the woman who manages the assets, the contracts, the PR storms.
I try to think about the team’s travel insurance policies, the press release we might need to draft if things take a turn, the fact that I shouldn’t even be in this state without an explicit authorization form from the firm’s compliance department.
I try to be his agent.
But her hand is so warm.
“I’m so sorry we couldn’t get here sooner,” I say, the professional armor cracking before I can even finish the sentence. “The flights from the—”
“You’re here now,” she interrupts gently, her fingers giving mine a soft, reassuring squeeze that I don’t deserve. “That’s what matters. He’s been waiting for Finn.”
She doesn’t give me a chance to step back into the shadow of the doorframe. Instead, she reaches out with her other hand and pulls me toward her.
It’s not even a polite, tentative embrace; it’s the heavy, unconditional pull of a mother who recognizes another person who loves her son.
“Thank you for bringing him home,” she whispers into my shoulder. “Thank you for taking care of my boy.”
My throat locks up entirely. I can’t speak, can’t promise her anything, can’t even find a way to justify my presence.
When she releases me, she goes back to Cash, taking his face between her hands.
“Look at you,” she says. “You look like you haven’t slept since Tuesday, Finn. Sit down before you fall down.”
Cash moves past us, his shoes silent on the linoleum now as he steps up to the side of the bed. He sinks into the small plastic chair by the rails, his knees nearly touching his chin because the seat is so low.
He reaches out, his massive hand—the one that has made thousands of glove saves at a hundred miles per hour—enveloping the frail, papery fingers of his father.
“Dad,” Cash says. His voice is a wreck. “Hey, Dad. It’s me. It’s Finn.”
The old man’s head moves slowly, the neck muscles twisting with a dry, clicking sound against the white pillowcase. His cloudy eyes slide away from the ceiling, rolling across the room until they land on Cash’s face.
Nothing happens.
The lines on his forehead stay slack.
The recognition doesn’t come.
“The water’s high today,” the old man mutters, his voice a ghost of a sound. “Tell the foreman we need the gravel at the third pier. The trucks are going to be late if the tide comes in.”
“Dad, no,” Cash whispers, leaning closer. “It’s Finnian. I’m home from the trip, Dad. We went all the way to Denver.”
The old man doesn’t look at him again. His gaze wanders back to the ceiling, his lips moving silently as he counts the tiny holes in the white tiles.
“He hasn’t known where he was since yesterday afternoon,” his mother says, coming to stand behind Cash’s chair. She rests her hands on his broad shoulders, her thumbs kneading the tension there. “He keeps trying to get up to find his work stuff. He thinks he’s thirty again, Finn.”
Cash doesn’t move. He keeps his face pressed against the rail of the bed, his chest heaving with a silent sob that shakes his entire upper body.
It’s a horrible, violent kind of grief—the kind that doesn’t have any sound to it because the man crying is too large to let the noise out in front of his mother.
“I should’ve been here,” Cash chokes out. “I shouldn’t have taken the road trip. I knew he was getting worse. I knew it when he called me and asked if I’d finished my homework.”
“Oh, Finnian, no,” his mother says, her own eyes filling with tears that run straight down into the deep lines around her mouth. She leans down, wrapping her arms around his neck from behind, burying her face in his hair.
“You couldn’t have stopped the bad from coming, baby. You have your own life. He was always so proud of you. Every time you were on the television, even when he didn’t know your name, he’d point at the screen and say, ‘That’s the boy from South Boston. That’s our boy.’”
I stand by the door, my back pressed against the wood, my hands buried deep in the pockets of Cash’s sweatshirt. My fingers find a loose thread in the hem and start pulling at it, over and over, until the cotton digs into my skin, marking me.
This is the one thing I was never trained for.
There is no playbook for the slow-motion car crash of the human mind. There is no precedent to cite when a man’s history is being bleached white by a disease that doesn’t care about his legacy.
No arbitration clause in the world can fix a brain that is systematically erasing its own blueprints.
Cash looks like he’s trying to physically hold onto a ghost, his shoulders trembling with the effort of staying upright for a man who is already halfway out the door.
His shirt is wrinkled, his eyes are bloodshot, and he looks… diminished. Like the world is finally too heavy for the Golden Boy to carry.
I watch his thumb move across his father’s knuckles. It’s the same small, rhythmic circle he was making against my shoulder last night while we were talking about Gary and Bernadette’s lives.
I love him.
It’s not the fun, dangerous kind of love we were playing with under the highway bridges or against the marble counter in Denver.
It’s this—this gray, quiet, suffocating weight in the room.
I love the way his shoulders look when they’re broken down. I love the fact that he’s too stubborn to leave the chair even though his dad doesn’t know who he is.
I love the whole messy, complicated, terrifying package of him, legal boundaries and agency rules be damned.
Mrs. O’Connell looks up from her son’s hair and catches me watching them. She reaches out one hand toward me, leaving her other arm around Cash’s neck.
“Come here, sweetie,” she says softly. “There’s room.”
I don’t hesitate this time. I walk across the cold linoleum, my sneakers making a faint sticky sound against the floor, and I stop right behind Cash’s chair. I place one hand on the small of his back and I let my other hand find his mother’s fingers.
Cash doesn’t look up, but when my hand touches his spine, his breathing shifts. The sharp hitches in his chest slow down just a fraction, his body leaning back just enough to press his weight against my palm.
I love him.
But I don’t say it. I can’t. The words are too big for this small room, and right now, Cash doesn’t need a girl telling him she loves him while his father is disappearing into the ceiling tiles.
He needs an anchor. He needs someone who can look at the charts and the doctors and the billable hours without losing their mind.
So I keep my mouth shut.
I stay by the bed, my hand flat against his back, the word love sitting under my tongue like an unexploded shell, heavy and dangerous and completely silent.