Rafe: Yeah. Tomorrow.
Tomorrowbecomes a placeholder. A promise we keep making and breaking without acknowledging it.
Days blur into weeks.
Rafe sends voice notes from buses and planes and green rooms and hotel hallways. I send mine from empty gyms and quiet corridors and rooms that all look the same no matter what city I’m in.
Sometimes we sync up and manage a real conversation. Sometimes one of us falls asleep mid-call. Sometimes we talk about nothing—food, schedules, dumb stories from the road—because it’s easier than circling the thing that still hasn’t healed.
Two months in, and late at night, Rafe starts to say, “We need to talk about—” He stops. There’s a pause long enough for my pulse to spike. “Never mind,” he says lightly. “Not now.”
I exhale an unsteady breath. “Okay,” I say, grateful.
I tell myself it’s mercy. That he’s protecting me. Giving me space.
Later, lying alone in a hotel bed, I wonder if he heard that moment differently. If, to him, it sounded like surrender.
As the weeks go by, the silence grows roots. It slips into the cracks between our conversations, filling space neither of us knows how to clear without causing damage. We start editing ourselves automatically. Choosing safer topics. Shorter calls.
And then something awful happens. He tells me he’s got a crazy couple of days so not to expect to hear from him right away. And the quiet that follows is… a relief.
No waiting for a call that might not come. No bracing myself for a conversation I don’t know how to finish. No fear of saying the wrong thing and making everything worse.
Just quiet.
I sit with that realization on a Tuesday night in late October, alone in my apartment, practice done, body aching in the good way. The city hums outside. My phone is face down on the counter.
The quiet feels manageable, and that makes me feel like the worst husband alive.
I love him. God, I love him. But love isn’t fixing this right now. It’s just coexisting with distance and hoping that time, movement, momentum—something—will do the work neither of us seems able to do ourselves.
When I finally flip my phone over, there’s a missed call from Rafe, time-stamped an hour ago.
I don’t call back.Tomorrow,I tell myself.Tomorrow will be better.
Tomorrow always is. Until it isn’t.
By early November, the routine is set.
Not the comforting kind. The kind that hardens around you if you don’t fight it, like calcium. Days built from the same pieces—practice, film, weights, treatment, sleep that barely counts, and then whatever slice of empty time is left at the end when my brain tries to eat me alive.
On the court, I’m doing well. Better than well, some nights.
Efficient minutes. Clean rotations. Closeouts sharp enough that Coach actually nods at me like I’m not a liability. I’m not in the starting five consistently, but I’m starting enough games that my name pops up in recaps. I’m closing quarters. I’m getting called in when things are tight, when they need someone who won’t panic.
It’s not lost on me that I’ve become the guy who doesn’t panic.
If they only knew.
Kirk and I don’t speak. We don’t even pretend to. We share the floor because we have to, because Coach expects professionals. Kirk can chirp at refs and bark at other guys, can stomp around like he owns the gym, but I don’t give him anything anymore. Not a reaction, not a glance, not the satisfaction of my attention. He’s a shadow I move around.
It’s easy, honestly.
Basketball is simple. You see the play. You execute. You recover. You do your job. It’s the silence after that’s the problem.
The quiet is where everything I’ve been holding down starts clawing back up. I wake at 3:00 a.m. more nights than not, eyes snapping open like someone shook me awake. My jaw aches from clenching. My shoulders are tight. My phone is always within reach, face down or face up depending on what kind of courage I think I have.
I lie there and replay conversations that never finished. Porch boards. A front door closing. Rafe’s voice:“We’ll take a breath.”
