Page 16 of The Sweetest Return

The pop beneath my kneecap came before the pain.

No hit. No defender rolling into me. Nothing dramatic enough to explain why my knee folded beneath me and refused the next thing I told it to do.

I tried to stand anyway.

Of course I did.

Nate Cole, one of our tight ends, got to me first.

“Stay down.”

“I’m good.”

“You ain’t.”

He was right.

By the time the trainers reached me, eighty thousand people had gone quiet and cameras were closing in.

That part stayed with me.

One red light in my face.

Millions of people watching Andre Jones figure out something inside his body had gone wrong.

So I fixed my expression. Loosened my jaw. Breathed through my nose. Gave them nothing they could turn into a tragedy reel before anybody even told me what happened.

Inside, it was a mess.

Why couldn’t I straighten my leg? How bad was it? Could they fix it? How many weeks? How many months?

Training camp was a long way off.

That had to be enough time.

Then my mind went where I didn’t want it to.

My career.

My future.

The contract I had signed before the season started. Four years, eighty-eight million dollars, fifty-two guaranteed because the Forge had decided I was worth building an offense around.

What happened to all of that if my leg didn’t come back?

What happened to me?

The crowd started chanting when the cart came out. I raised one hand and let them cheer because that was what number twenty-two was supposed to do. Keep his head up. Let everybody know he was good when he had no fucking idea if he was.

My teammates were already gathering for the next play when the cart started toward the tunnel.

Football kept going.

I didn’t know yet if I could.

The MRI showed a complete rupture of the patellar tendon. Surgery came two days later, and when the surgeon said some athletes had returned from the injury, everybody grabbed onto that sentence like the rest of what he said didn’t count.

So did I.