“Neither of our situations have changed,” she added. “We still work together. You still have Carolina.”
My jaw tensed at the mention of my daughter. It wasn’t what she’d said—it was how she’d said it. Like Carolina was a barrier separating me from any semblance of a personal life. To be fair, she wasn’t entirely wrong.
Carolina came first—always had, always would—and Dani respected that. It was hard enough growing up with divorced parents; doing it in the public eye with a dad who was on the road for four months of the year was something else entirely.
I owed her the relationship with her father that I’d never had.
“Brooks.” She took a breath, but it caught in her throat. “Please.Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
I wanted to argue. To tell her it didn’t have to be one or the other—that just because Carolina was everything didn’t mean there was no room foranythingelse. Forher.
But the way Dani looked at me just then—guarded, standoffish, her decision already made—I knew it wouldn’t matter. At some point in the last few minutes, she had rebuilt her walls, and I was no longer welcome inside the fortress.
So instead, I nodded. Slow and numb, like my body was moving half a beat behind everything else.
Dani gave me a ghost of a smile, one that didn’t reach her eyes, and turned away.
I watched her walk back toward her car. The silence between us stretched longer with every step she took. A leftover firework cracked somewhere in the distance, too late to matter.
And I just stood there like a fucking moron, watching, wondering, asking myself how something that had never officially started could already feel so over?
Dani
Roasters 1–0
The twenty-sided die rolled across the table before coming to a lopsided stop on sixteen. “Does that mean my levitation spell worked?”
I looked up from my character sheet to find four sets of eyes gaping back at me like I had grown a second head. Technically, I was growing another head, but that was beside the point.
“Wait, wait, wait.” June blinked rapidly, like she was trying to reset her brain. “Rewind and play back the tape, please.”
Jo muffled a laugh. “The tape,mami? You’re really showing your age.”
“Shut up,” she said, swatting at his shoulder. Not that he could feel it through his thick wool sweater. “You’re the oldest one at this table.”
He clutched his imaginary pearls. “By seven months. And those months gave me wisdom, thank you.”
No one laughed, though.
The banter dried up as everyone turned their attention toward me. The weight of it settled over the table like a dense fog.
Clarke was the one to finally break the silence. “You’re pregnant.”
Oof, that was going to take some getting used to. I had just wrapped my head around the idea of beingpregnant. Saying it aloud or hearing it said to me—aboutme—was a completely different story.
I pivoted in my seat to face my friend, and that was when I saw it: the tiny flicker of hurt in her eyes. And damn, if that didn’t burn more than the acid reflux I had been experiencing lately.
Just another fun side effect of pregnancy.
Clarke was a lot more than just a colleague. We had worked together every day for over a year now. I had been the one to hire her for the social media team when she’d been fresh out of a toxic relationship, desperate for a new start. Since then, we had become a two-woman army—cloaked in matching Roasters’ jerseys, living off stadium pretzels and sarcasm, and texting during meetings like middle school tweens.
And still, I hadn’t told her about Brooks.
I shifted in my seat, suddenly wishing I could shrink inside my hoodie. “Yeah, I am.”
She didn’t say anything right away. Just nodded like she was adding it up in her head—my recent mood swings, the bouts of nausea during the first away series that I had played off as food poisoning, my sudden obsession with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and ice cream. And Flamin’ Hot Cheetosdunkedin ice cream.
I swallowed hard. “I wasn’t trying to hide it from you. Any of you. I just— I needed time to figure out how I felt about it before I said the words out loud.”
