He exhaled, his shoulders easing, like he’d been holding tension for both of us. “Okay.”
That single word steadied me in a way my mother never had. Like he believed in me.
And then, because the universe hates me, my voice cracked. “But it still hurts.”
Ledger swallowed. Hard. “I know.”
I looked at him fully then. At his broad shoulders stretching the fabric of his T-shirt, his bare feet, the muscle in his jaw working like he wanted to fight something on my behalf.
And for a terrifying second, I felt safer than I should.
Far safer than I had any right to feel.
I wiped my eyes and straightened. “I’m fine.”
He didn’t argue. But I was pretty sure he didn’t believe me, either. “Okay. But if you ever want to talk about it?—”
I shook my head. “I won’t.”
He cracked the smallest smile. “Yeah. I figured.”
Something loosened in my chest, painful and warm and stupid.
Enemies didn’t look at each other like this.
Uneasy allies, maybe.
Something else … possibly.
But not enemies.
Not anymore.
CHAPTER 11
LEDGER
The Wilson Center buzzed with meet-day energy—echoing voices bouncing off tile and concrete, splashing warm-up laps slapping against the pool walls, the sharp scent of chlorine clinging to everything. It wrapped around me the second I walked in, familiar and welcoming, like stepping into a place that knew me better than most people ever had.
I moved through on autopilot, stretching, rolling my shoulders, trying to quiet the noise in my head.
I hit the water for warm-ups and immediately felt it. That easy glide, the clean line through the water, and the rhythm clicking back into place. My body remembered what my brain had almost convinced me to forget. Stroke after stroke, everything lined up the way it was supposed to, muscle memory taking over before doubt had a chance to interfere.
I still belonged here.
So why the nerves?
I told myself they were normal.
Swim meet mornings always carried a charge—chlorine already clinging to my skin before I even stepped onto the deck, my body humming like it knew what was coming before my brain caught up. I’d lived most of my life inside that hum. Trusted it. Built my sense of worth around it. When everything else in my life had felt uncertain, the pool had always been constant. Lanes were lanes. Times were times. You either hit them or you didn’t.
Still, as I stood in the locker room putting my clothes in my bag after changing into my tech suit, my attention kept drifting to my phone sitting face down on the bench beside me.
I’d checked it twice already, even though I knew there wouldn’t be anything new. No missed call. No last-minute text saying she couldn’t make it after all. Roxie wasn’t the type to bail, but my brain kept supplying worst-case scenarios anyway—work running late, a sudden scheduling conflict, or worse, a last-minute realization that pretending to be my wife in public wasn’t worth the hassle.
The thought struck me harder than I expected.
Because if she didn’t show, it wouldn’t just be awkward. It would be visible.Questionsvisible. Administrators and sponsors who smiled too easily now, the same ones who’d looked at me like a liability just weeks ago, would notice. One empty seat in the stands, one missing piece of the carefully constructed picture, and suddenly everything could feel precarious again.
