He didn’t post often. Mostly team photos, all helmets and grins and adrenaline. A few stories with Parker and Jace and their girlfriends at parties—red Solo cups, neon lights, the kind of normal college life that looked like another planet to me.
I stopped atthepost. The one that ruined me for days the second I saw it.
It wasn’t even new. It was months old, buried halfway down his feed of him on the field, hair damp, the Tennessee sun turning the sweat on his skin into gold. A little kid perched on his shoulders, holding a foam finger too big for his hands. Matty was laughing, his head tilted back, teeth showing. A laugh that felt like proof life could actually be that good.
I zoomed in until the pixels blurred so I could study the crease near his mouth, the faint smear of dirt on his cheek…theway his hand steadied the kid like it was the easiest thing in the world.
The caption was just a heart emoji. And that was all it took, as usual.
My breath hitched, like I’d been running.
He’d probably be a good dad. The man who’d show up to everything. Who’d never raise his voice. Who’d hold your hand in a hospital room, even if you were broken and bleeding and couldn’t speak.
I knew what it felt like to be the one in that bed. To need someone who never came.
You sound crazy, a voice whispered in my head.
It wasn’t loud, just steady, like someone stating a fact. The same voice that used to scold me when I lingered too long outside Nico’s class, or when I memorized which lights in his house turned on first, or when I replayed his soccer interviews at night just to hear him laugh.
I tried to shove the voice down, the way I always did.
But lately, it had been harder to drown out.
It was getting meaner, louder in the parts of me no one else could touch, and maybe it was right. Maybe I was just living the same story again, only with different names.
“No. I’m not,” I whispered fiercely.
But that sounded less true every day.
I stared at the picture until my phone screen dimmed. Tapped it back awake. Scrolled up. Back down. As if he were going to update his pictures while he was at practice.
I stared at it until my phone battery died.
A shout from the field cut through the stillness, loud enough to jolt me upright.
Somewhere along the way, it had gotten dark. The sky had turned deep blue, swallowing the edges of everything, and the floodlights around the practice field glared against it, harsh andartificial, humming softly like they were the only things keeping the world awake. The parking lot lamps buzzed, too, casting wide yellow pools across the asphalt.
I blinked, disoriented, the world rushing back in with the smell of asphalt and hot rubber and the metallicclangof a gate swinging open.
Then came the cleats again.
That sound I knew better than my own heartbeat by this point.
I shoved my dead phone onto the passenger seat and sat perfectly still, my breath caught halfway in my chest. One by one, they came into view, helmets tucked under their arms, the parking lot and practice field lights casting white halos over their sweat-damp skin.
And there he was.
His hair was darker now that it was wet with sweat, curling against his neck. He walked with the sort of ease that made people watch without realizing they were watching. Parker jogged beside him, throwing a water bottle that Jace caught behind his back with a grin.
Matty’s laugh carried, low and warm, rolling over the distance between us.
I should have looked away. I knew that.
Instead, I leaned forward, palms pressed to the steering wheel, eyes locked on him through the windshield.
He reached up, running a hand through his hair, and for one terrible, breathtaking second, his gaze flicked toward my row of cars.
Straight towardme.
