I blinked. Tanner was watching me, something measured in his expression.
“You good?”
“Yeah,” I lied. “Just sore.”
He didn’t believe me. I could see it in his face. But he let it go, turned back to his phone, and I was grateful for the reprieve.
The problem with living with Tanner McBride was that every day made it harder to remember why wanting him was a terrible idea. Every casual touch, every quiet morning, every time he said my name like it meant something, all added up to a feeling I couldn’t afford.
I was a football player. The embodiment of everything that had destroyed his family.
But I was also the person who made him coffee in the morning, made sure he ate, and noticed when the grief got too heavy.
And I didn’t know which part of me would win.
My phone buzzed one more time. I ignored it and closed my eyes, listening to Tanner breathe across the room. The ache in my ribs had nothing on the ache building in my chest—the slow accumulation of mornings like this one, of wanting something I couldn’t name and couldn’t have.
For now, this was what we had. I told myself it could be enough.
I was already starting to doubt it.
3
TANNER
I was halfway through a fluid dynamics problem set when the email notification slid into the corner of my screen—one of those automatic alerts from the research database I’d set up months ago and mostly forgotten about.
I made the mistake of clicking it.
Subject: New Article - Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Former Professional Athletes: A Longitudinal Study
I shouldn’t have opened it. Should have closed the tab, gone back to my assignment, pretended I hadn’t seen it. But my finger was already clicking, my eyes already scanning the abstract, and then I was reading about brain tissue analysis, tau protein deposits, and the correlation between years played and severity of neurodegeneration.
The apartment went quiet, and I kept reading. Through the methodology section. Through the results. Through the discussion where they talked about early-onset dementia,behavioral changes, and the way the brain ate itself from the inside out.
My hands went numb somewhere around paragraph three.
There was a table.Figure 4: Correlation Between Career Length and Postmortem CTE Diagnosis. The line climbed steadily upward with each additional year of play—a gentle slope at first, almost dismissible, then steeper and steeper until the curve bent toward something that looked inevitable. Five years in, and the odds were already stacked against you. Ten years, and the likelihood more than doubled. Fifteen years, and the graph showed nearly everyone.
Dad had played twelve years professionally. Another four in college.
How many of his former teammates and fellow players were walking around with ticking bombs in their brains? The thought was enough to make it nearly impossible to breathe.
I closed the laptop, but the numbers stayed burned into my vision. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the distant sound of someone’s TV through the wall, my own pulse hammering in my ears.
I should get up. Should do something. Should move. I stayed in the chair instead, frozen the way I had been so many times over the last two years.
The light from the window shifted. Shadows crawled across the floor. My phone buzzed twice on the table beside me. I didn’t reach for it.
Somewhere in the rational part of my brain, I knew this was a bad sign. Knew I was shutting down, dissociating, whateverclinical term applied to the way the world had gone flat and distant. But knowing didn’t help. Knowing never helped.
I thought about one of the last times I’d been home before the end. The way Dad had looked at me without recognition, like I was a stranger who’d wandered into his living room. The way his hands had trembled when he’d tried to drink water. The way he’d asked me, three times in ten minutes, what year it was.
“Tanner?”
I blinked. The shadows had moved farther across the floor. The light had gone golden, which meant it was late afternoon, which meant I’d been sitting here for?—
How long had I been sitting here?
