Page 19 of Her Player

I watched her move through the entryway and thought about the fact that she’d bought this place for Ryan.

That she’d been maintaining it for fourteen years without living in it.

That she’d walked us all through her front door tonight like it was just a tactical decision, gate and grounds and enough space so the press couldn’t get near it, and I was maybe the only person in the building who understood that it wasn’t just tactical at all.

She was facing something tonight on top of everything else.

And she was doing it the way she did everything.

Without telling a single person it was hard.

When Victoria marched past me, I knew better than to go after her. I wanted to. In some ways, part of me needed to. But she was a determined, stubborn woman. And I knew that once she set her mind to something, there was no deterring her.

So I let her leave to go figure out what the hell we were doing for food.

Though I doubted any of us were hungry.

“Please tell me you’re going to go cook, Mom,” Bry said as her voice came out of the woodworks.

I heard Victoria put on her Mom voice. “Of course I am. I figured I’d make your favorite.”

Bry gasped. “Chicken and dumplings with those roasted apple cider vegetables?”

“The one and only,” Victoria said.

“Then I’ll make my blackberry pie,” Bry said.

“Perfect combination,” Victoria said, their voices retreating in the distance as they made their way closer to the kitchen.

Which meant further away from me.

I jammed my hands into my pockets and decided to take a walk.

I knew what to do with a press gauntlet. I knew what to do with a locker room full of guys after a loss. I knew what to do with a Coach I’d watched walk out of his own home with his shoes untied because his hands had been shaking too hard to manage the laces.

I did not know what to do in this house.

The Willow Estate was the kind of place where you could disappear inside it, which I figured was probably the point. The marble floors carried sound too far. I tried to walk quiet, the way I’d walked through my grandmother’s house when I was seven and she was sleeping in the chair again because the chemo had taken everything she had that day. You learn how to move through a house full of grief young or you don’t learn at all.

I’d learned young.

I passed a sitting room with furniture that looked like nobody had sat on it in a decade. A library with books that had clearly been read once and then set behind glass like trophies. A hallway lined with framed photographs that I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at, because I knew exactly who was in them and I knew exactly which woman had been maintaining the frames and dusting the glass and not living in this house for fourteen straight years.

Ryan Caldwell had been gone fourteen years.

That was all I knew. That, and what the team knew, which was that he’d played for the Vipers when they were minor league and coached them before Victoria bought the franchise. The rest of the story belonged to the woman currently three rooms away, and I’d never asked. Not Coach. Not Brynn. Not Google. If she wanted me to know, she’d tell me. And if she didn’t, she didn’t.

The math was the part I couldn’t help calculating.

Brynn was twenty-five now. Fourteen years ago she’d been eleven. Victoria had been twenty-nine. Whatever happened, Victoria had walked through it with a kid still in middle school and a franchise that wasn’t yet hers and a foundation that didn’t yet have a name. She’d come out the other side with all three.

I didn’t know how.

I stopped in the middle of the hallway and took a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.

There was a photograph at eye level. Her and Ryan. They had to have been in their early twenties. Some beach somewhere, his arm around her waist, her hair half in her face from the wind, both of them laughing at something off-camera. She looked untouched. He looked like a man who would never not come home.

I made myself keep walking.