Maddy shrugs. “We’re all a little crazy. I mean, I drive a red Jeep I named after a pop star and think that orange soda is a reasonable substitute for water. But if you’re crazy, it’s because you snap a football and then protect a quarterback with nothing between you and serious bodily harm but some plastic and foam padding for four quarters a week, seventeen weeks a year, plus the playoffs. Not because certain external stressors affect you in a particular way because you experienced a severe trauma.”
I smile at the righteous indignation in Maddy’s voice. “My kids might tell you differently.” Then I tell Maddy about the pre-game pictures and the excessive I love yous. About how I sometimes feel like my kids are losing out because all they have is me when they should get to have their mom too. I tell her everything, and when I’m done talking, I feel...lighter, I think? Like maybe I didn’t realize how heavy the weight of all this was until Maddy stepped up to carry some of it with me.
“Okay, well I definitely need to see all those pictures now.”
I laugh, wondering how she knew the exact right thing to say in this moment. “I think I would really like to show you. But I’m warning you, when I said every game, I literally meant every game. There is one picture for every single game I’ve played since seven weeks before Riley was born.”
“All of them,” she says. “Every single one.” She pauses for aminute, almost like she’s arguing with herself before she starts talking again. “I get it, you know. Better than you might think.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighs, pressing herself deeper into her pillows, almost like she needs more comfort for whatever she’s about to say, and I find myself wishing she was lying here, with her head on my shoulder, taking her comfort from me. “Scars,” she says simply. “I’ve got them too.”
“Tell me.”
Maddy gives me a small smile. “I told you I was adopted. My biological mom died when I was a baby, and my biological dad was an addict. I was in and out of the foster system—mostly in—for my first seven years until my parents adopted me. When I told you my parents are the greatest people in the world, I meant it. My family is…” She pauses, laughing a little. “Well, you kind of have to see it to believe it.”
I smile. “Tyler says the same thing.”
She nods, smiling back at me. “You get a little taste of it knowing Brian and Liv, and Tyler and Sophie, but there are so many of us. My mom and Tyler and Sophie’s moms have been best friends since law school. They and their fourth best friend all got married around the same time and created this big, tangled web of family. They had fifteen kids between the four of them, plus Brian and Liv’s kids, and there are more of us in Boston because of other close and more nebulous family connections. Sometimes I forget that most of us aren’t related by blood. Tyler’s actual grandma kind of adopted everyone into her fold, and the way she loves all of us like we’re hers? I didn’t know that kind of love existed in real life.” Maddy shakes her head in a kind of disbelief that someone could love her like that, and it makes my chest ache because I think that I could love her like that. One day. “I didn’t know families like mine existed in real life.”
“You spent a long time without one. A family, I mean,” I say, hearing what she isn’t saying.
She nods with something like relief that she doesn’t have toexplain herself. “And then, all of a sudden, I did. I had parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents. And then pretty soon I had cousins, and we all grew up together and they’re my best friends. I…belong,” she says after a long pause. “I’ve belonged to all of them for twenty-three years, and them to me, and still, sometimes, when I’m with them, my brain shoves me back to the time when I was seven years old, lonely and sad, wondering if I would ever get to have a home. And even after all this time, it still sometimes feels impossible that I get to have what I have. That I get to keep them. That they want to keep me.”
My heart cracks clean down the middle at Maddy’s words, and I have never in my life wished as desperately for a superpower as I do right now. The power to reach through the phone and touch her. To fly to her house and wrap her in my arms and promise her that she’ll never, ever be lonely again. To tell her she’ll always have a home because she can have one with me.
It’s too soon for any of that. I know it is. But this woman. This woman who altered the course of my life in one single night six weeks ago. Who played hockey with my son and talked my daughter through a bout of high school angst and wears purple shoes and smiles all the way up to her eyes when she talks about her family. Who loves cereal and M&M’s and is a safe space for me and who could, maybe, one day, share the burden of parenting that, for the past ten years, I’ve been shouldering alone. This woman has embedded herself into my heart, and I don’t want it to be any other way.
“You’re a fucking miracle, Maddy.”
She blinks at me in surprise. “I’m really not.”
“You are,” I say, moving the phone closer to my face as if that will help her hear the seriousness of my words. “You’re brilliant and fun and so damn beautiful it makes my chest ache. Your love for your family just pours out of you, and you light up every single room you’re in. The first seven years of your life were awful, but you are the most amazing person, and I’m glad…” I break off and take a breath before I start spilling feelings all over her. “I’m glad I get to spend a night talking to you like this. I’m just glad I get to know you.”
Maddy yawns, her eyes soft and tired. “I’m glad I get to know you, too. And I like talking to you. I think I would like to talk to you more.”
“I’d like that too. And I think I’d like to meet your whole wild and crazy family. At least the ones I don’t know. I’d like to know the people who made you who you are.”
She yawns again, her eyes drooping a little. “When you say things like that, it makes it really hard to resist you.” Her eyes close the rest of the way and her phone tilts, like her hand is too tired to hold it up anymore. “I don’t want to resist you anymore,” she mumbles. “Even though I should.”
“Rest, baby,” I murmur, smiling at her words, watching as she snuggles deeper into her pillow, her breathing turning slow and even as she drifts off.
I don’t hang up.
Maybe I should, and maybe it’s weird to watch her as she sleeps, but I can’t make myself end the call—as if pressing that red button will somehow sever the connection I feel to her tonight. We have a lot standing in our way. Maddy’s place with the team and her reputation in the league and two kids and a dead wife and a professional football career. Family and friends and obligations and two busy people with lives that rarely slow.
But tonight, none of that seems to matter.
Tonight, it’s just me and her and the darkness of night and two people who were once a little broken, finding their missing pieces in each other. We both know what it’s like to feel lost, I realize. But after talking to her tonight, it feels like maybe, for the first time in a long time, I’m found.
With that thought lingering in my mind, and without ending the call, I set my phone on the pillow next to me and reach up to shut off the light. And with the knowledge that she’s right there beside me, I close my eyes and meet her in my dreams.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MADDY
Maddy,
