She walked home. Thirty-five minutes through streets that were starting to look like a holiday card—wreaths on doors, frost on windows, a Salvation Army bell somewhere in the distance. She walked through it carrying the full weight of a truth she'd assembled wrong, every piece of evidence pointing somewhere she couldn't follow.
She'd tried to fix the one thing she could reach. And what she'd found was that the damage went deeper than she'd imagined. Not a crack she'd caused. A wound. And she was the one holding the knife.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The practice on Christmas Eve morning was always a bit of a shitshow.
Not on the field—on the field, Grant ran the same red zone packages three times until the timing was automatic, because the playoffs started January 4th and muscle memory didn't take holidays. But the locker room afterward had a giddy, half-cocked energy that no amount of coaching could contain. Thirty-six hours off. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, then back at it the twenty-sixth. For a team that had been grinding since July, it might as well have been a parole hearing.
Grant toweled off and pulled on a clean shirt. The brownstone would be quiet tonight. It was quiet most nights, but the holidays sharpened the silence into something with edges. He'd never minded quiet—had built his entire adult life around it, in fact. Sought it out. Paid a premium for a double-wide brownstone with no shared walls specifically so he could have more of it.
It had only started bothering him recently.
"Yo, Knight." Kendrick Okafor—left guard, six-four, three-fifteen, and the self-appointed social chair of the offensive line—appeared at the end of the row carrying a gift bag that was far too small for his hands. "Don't leave yet. We got you something."
Grant eyed the bag. "Should I be worried?"
"Deeply." Kendrick grinned. "Fellas!"
They materialized from around the corner like a flash mob that had rehearsed exactly once—Boozy, Terrell, Javi, Thompson with his arm still in a soft cast from the Raiders game. Even Coach Phelps was lurking by the doorway, pretending to check his phone and doing a terrible job of hiding his smile.
"We had a hard time this year," Kendrick said, assuming the posture of a man delivering a eulogy. "Finding you a gift. Because what do you get the man who has everything—except, apparently, a girlfriend."
"Here we go," Grant muttered.
"The man who can read a Cover 2 shell in under a second but can't read a room full of women." Kendrick held up the bag. "The man with a name like Knight who still can't rescue himself."
Terrell lost it first. Then Boozy, who laughed so hard he had to sit down on the bench. Even Thompson was wheezing, which had to hurt his ribs.
Grant took the bag. Inside: a book.The Complete Idiot's Guide to Finding Mr. Right, dog-eared and clearly purchased from a thrift store, with a Post-it on the cover that read:
We believe in you champ
Grant turned it over and pretended to study the back cover with genuine concentration. "Does this work for finding Ms. Right, or do I need the companion volume?"
"See, that's your problem right there," Kendrick said. "You're already overcomplicating it."
"Man can dissect a Tampa 2 but can't ask a woman to dinner," Javi added, shaking his head with theatrical sadness.
"I can ask a woman to dinner."
"Can you, though?" Boozy raised his eyebrows. "Because the evidence suggests?—"
"The evidence suggests I need new friends."
That got a laugh—the kind that rattled off the metal lockers and filled the room with something warm and profane and familiar. These were men who'd bled for each other on Sundays and would never, under any circumstances, let a teammate have a bad day without making it worse first.
Grant tucked the book into his duffel. "I'm keeping this."
"You better. Cost us twenty bucks.”
"Highway robbery."
"That's what Boozy said." Kendrick slapped Grant's shoulder. "Merry Christmas, Cap. Try not to spend the whole break alone watching film like a psychopath."
"I make no promises."
The locker room thinned. Guys filtered out in waves, and the fluorescent hum filled the spaces they left behind.
