Page 20 of Her Player

The thing was, I’d been waiting for this woman for about three damn years before I knew her name.

Not Victoria specifically. The idea of her. The shape of her. A woman who knew what she was doing and didn’t need me to teach her anything, who could carry her own weight and mine and probably half the room’s if she had to, who walked into a building and the air rearranged itself around her. I’d been looking for that woman since I was probably fifteen years old, which was the age I figured out my mother wasn’t coming back and started constructing in my head what a woman who DID come back would look like.

I’d built her out of negatives.

She wouldn’t be someone who left.

She wouldn’t be someone who couldn’t be counted on.

She wouldn’t be someone who made promises about birthdays and Christmases and showing up to school plays and then stopped picking up the phone on a Tuesday in March when I was eleven and that was just that.

She wouldn’t be like my mother.

My mother was alive somewhere. That was the part nobody really knew what to do with. People expected the boy with the mom story to have a dead mom, a tragedy with edges, something they could nod at and then change the subject. Mine wasn’t dead. Mine just left. She was somewhere in the world right now, breathing air I was also breathing, and I had no idea where, and she had not contacted me in sixteen years, and that was the entirety of the explanation I was ever going to get.

My grandmother had taken me in. My father had been there too, technically. But my father had been the kind of present that wasn’t present, the kind of man who lived in the same house as you and managed to never quite be in the same room. He worked. He came home. He drank a beer. He fell asleep in front of the TV. He drove me to practice when he had to and signed the permission slips when he had to and that was about the depth of what he had to give. I didn’t blame him. He was carrying his own version of the same hole I was carrying. He just didn’t have any extra left over for a kid.

My grandmother had the extra.

She’d had me in the kitchen by five learning how to roast a chicken before I could properly hold a knife. She’d had me sitting through full episodes of Golden Girls reruns at six years old because she said TV was the babysitter she could afford and at least the Golden Girls would teach me how to talk to women. She’d been right about that too. Half the reason I knew how to read a room full of women was Bea Arthur. The other half was watching my grandmother handle her own grief at the kitchen table at fifty-eight and never once letting it spill onto me.

She’d died when I was twenty-one. Cancer.

I’d been drafted three months later.

I’d never wanted kids of my own. Not because I disliked them. I liked plenty of kids. The neighbor’s daughter on my street who waited on her porch to wave at me when I came home from practice. Jett’s nieces and nephews who treated me like a piece of jungle gym equipment every time they visited. But the math of it had never added up for me. I knew what it cost a kid to have a parent who couldn’t show up. My mother hadn’t shown up. My father had shown up in body and nothing else. I’d watched what that did to a kid because I’d been that kid. And I’d promised myself young that if I wasn’t sure I could be the kind of father who came home every single time he said he would, I wasn’t going to roll the dice on a kid’s whole life.

I was sure of a lot of things.

I wasn’t sure of that.

So when I tell you that I’d been waiting for Victoria Caldwell for three years before I met her, when I tell you that I’d been looking for the shape of her since I was fifteen, what I mean is this. I’d been looking for a woman who knew exactly what it cost to keep showing up. A woman who’d earned the lines at the corners of her eyes. A woman who’d buried something and was still standing on her own two feet in heels every morning. A woman whose daughter was grown and whose chapter on raising a kid was closed, because mine was closed too. I wasn’t going to give Victoria something she didn’t want. And she wasn’t going to ask me for something I couldn’t give.

I’d found her.

She was forty-three years old, she was the owner of the team I played for, and she was currently three rooms away making chicken and dumplings for her grown daughter because that was what she did when the world tried to break someone she loved. She kept feeding them. She kept the house standing. She kept showing up.

I leaned against the wall of her dead husband’s hallway and put my head back against the molding and closed my eyes for one long second.

I was so deeply, stupidly, helplessly in love with her.

I’d known it for months. I’d been refusing to call it by its name because calling it by its name made it a thing I had to do something about, and I didn’t have the right to do anything about it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. She was my boss. She was a grown woman with a grown daughter and a foundation and a franchise and a wall around her that I had spent two years studying the architecture of. I didn’t have any business loving her. I had absolutely no business standing in her dead husband’s house tonight wanting to be the man who handled the press at her gate so she didn’t have to.

But here I was.

And there she was, in the kitchen, making her daughter’s favorite meal because keeping people fed was how she kept them alive.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket.

I had a press gauntlet to handle. I had a Sheriff to call. I had a captain’s job to do, which was making sure my Coach and his girl and the woman who owned the team were safe for the night before I let myself sleep.

I’d think about the rest tomorrow.

I walked out the front door, and I was faced with a pristinely manicured lawn. Willow trees dotted the landscape, no doubt one of the reasons why the estate was called what it was. They swayed in the breeze that kicked up, the grass rustling and undulating like green ocean waves. But all too soon, the peaceful moment was shattered by barking voices floating on the wind. And when I turned to gaze down the impossibly long, winding driveway, I squinted my eyes just enough to see that the press had gathered at the wrought iron gate.

With them shoving their cameras between the slats and waving them around, taking idle pictures and hoping they hit the jackpot.

“Fucking hell,” I grumbled.