Page 24 of Her Player

But it wasn’t the franchise hit that would actually hurt. The franchise would survive. I had built it to survive me.

It was the foundation.

The Ryan Caldwell Foundation had spent fourteen years building a reputation as a serious organization. Senators returned my calls. Donors wrote checks at the gala the size of small businesses. The work we’d funded had touched six counseling centers and three legislative initiatives and a generation of families who had lost someone the way I had lost Ryan. All of it was built on the bedrock of a single quiet narrative the public had decided to believe about me: that I was a woman who had loved her husband and never gotten over him and channeled that grief into something useful.

The minute I was photographed kissing a hockey player sixteen years my junior, that narrative cracked. The donors would still come, probably. The senators would still pick up the phone, probably. But the bedrock would be gone, and Ryan’s name on a foundation would become a punchline at the country club, and that I could not survive.

So.

Not fantasize about some too-young hockey player sixteen years my junior.

I listened out as I made my way back into the closet and changed out of my clothing. I’d been in it for far too long today, if I did say so myself. I unwound my hair from its tightly kept bun, allowing my still-pin-straight hair to fall down past my shoulders. I stripped out of my outfit, tossing them into a corner that I had just then dubbed my ‘dry cleaning’ corner.

I rummaged around in my suitcase until my fingertips felt the fabric.

To say I enjoyed the finer things was an understatement.

If there was one thing I took seriously besides this franchise, it was the clothes on my back. Many people called me selfish for it. Some called me vain. Even more called me greedy, and I’m sure many things had been whispered behind my back in this city where red-bottomed shoes were something kids painted accidentally while Mom and Dad weren’t looking.

I looked down at the pair currently on my feet.

Christian Louboutin. The So Kate pump in classic black patent, one hundred and twenty millimeters of heel that I’d been walking in since before Brynn could walk herself. I owned fourteen pairs of Louboutins. Seven pairs of Manolo Blahniks. A rotating collection of Chanel suits that my dry cleaner knew by name. The Birkin on the shelf in my closet at home had a five year waiting list that I hadn’t waited on because waiting lists were for people who couldn’t make a phone call.

Ryan used to tease me about it mercilessly.

He wore the same three pairs of shoes in rotation and genuinely could not understand why a human being needed more than that. I used to tell him it was about power. That there was something about the click of a well-made heel on a polished floor that put the room on notice before you’d said a single word. He’d nod seriously like he was taking notes and then ruin it completely by saying something like “so basically you’re just being loud on purpose” and I’d throw a throw pillow at him and he’d catch it because he always caught everything I threw.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at my heels for a long moment.

The Ryan Caldwell Foundation had sent me their quarterly report this morning. I hadn’t read it yet. It was sitting in my email along with forty-seven other things I hadn’t touched since the media situation erupted. But I knew the numbers by heart. Three point two million raised this fiscal year for gun violence victims and their families. Six new grief counseling centers funded across Nevada. A scholarship program at Brynn’s old high school that Ryan would have been absolutely insufferable about in the best possible way.

I’d built the foundation the same year I took over the franchise. Fourteen years of writing checks and chairing galas and sitting across tables from senators who needed to be reminded what the human cost of inaction actually looked like. It was the one thing I did that I never talked about publicly. Not because I was modest, and I was categorically not modest, but because Ryan hadn’t been modest either, and he would have hated the idea of his name being used for anything that felt like performance.

So it was quiet. Deliberate. The way he was.

I slipped the Louboutins off my feet and set them side by side on the floor with the deliberate care of someone who understood exactly what they were worth.

I held up my silken spaghetti-strapped nightgown. A blend of linen and silk that was just as soft as it was light and airy. For many, the combination sounded dreadful. Ugly, even. But the lightweight, flowy fabric made a great nightgown set. I slipped the black nightgown over my head, watching it fall over my curves and settle right at my ankles. I whipped the matching linen-silk-blend robe, tying it off around my broad waist. A waist that had never quite settled back into position after having my daughter.

Then I made my way out of the closet and into the bathroom so that I could take out my fucking contacts.

I swear, sometimes, taking off contacts was more liberating than removing a bra.

I peeled the dried plastic off my eyes and blinked a few times. Instead of adding them into the solution, I decided to chuck them. If I couldn’t remember the last time I replaced them, then it was time for a new set, anyway. I fumbled around for my purse before I found it back out next to the bed and dug out my glasses.

I would search for a new pair of contacts in the morning.

Knock, knock, knock.

Three rapid knocks came at my bedroom door before I heard Rhett’s voice. “Dinner is served. Mind getting the door?”

The smell of veggie alfredo and Brynn’s pie wafted through the closed door, and I quickly recovered an unopened set of contacts. My stomach growled, denoting a need for sustenance, so after I placed everything where I needed it to be for the next morning, I strode for the bedroom door. And when I whipped it open, there the gargantuan stood, holding a massive tray with two steaming hot meals on it. Complete with tall, iced glasses of soda.

I swear to hell on high, there was no one on this planet more considerate than Rhett.

Sometimes, anyway.

“Please tell me that’s root beer,” I said as I stepped off to the side, ushering him into the room with my arm.