Page 93 of Colliding with Ten

“Finishing the Business degree at USC.” I exhaled. “He had my life mapped out. He wanted me on a corporate track, taking over his real estate business. He tried it with AJ too.” I shook my head. “The cheerleading was an embarrassment to him. And he doesn’t know about the fellowship yet.”

“Are you serious about it?”

“Yes. But sometimes I think, what if he’s right? What if I’m romanticizing this and running away from the hard thing?”

“The Business degree?”

“Any hard thing. Ballet got hard, and I didn’t fight for it as I should have. The degree got hard, and I left. What if becoming a doctor gets hard, and I do it again?”

“That’s not what happened with ballet,” Lennox said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know what you told me in Denver. Ballet didn’t get hard. Your life got hard, and ballet was the only thing that was still yours.” He paused. “And I know what I watched you do at that photoshoot. That’s not someone who quits when it gets difficult. That’s someone who fought to come back. Now you’re going for something you want, not something someone is pushing onto you.”

I pressed my lips together and stared at the ceiling.

“You’ve been listening to your dad’s voice so long, you’ve started mistaking it for your own.”

I paused, not knowing how to respond. “That’s—” I stopped. “How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Say the thing I needed to hear.”

“I’m not. I’m just telling you what I see. I’ve practiced filtering out voices that aren’t mine.”

Then his tone shifted. “I dated someone a few years ago, for eighteen months.”

“What happened?”

“She wanted a version of me I couldn’t give her. I cared. But football was everything then. The injury had just happened. I was in rehab and terrified I’d never play the same again.” He paused. “She needed someone present, and I was somewhere else, thinking about what others were saying. I was in my head. I kept thinking if I could just get back on the field, get back to myself, then I’d have room for everything else.”

“But it didn’t work that way?”

“Nope. By the time I got back, she was gone. And I didn’t want to admit for a long time that I understood why.” He exhaled. “I’d made myself very easy to leave.”

“Do you still do that? Make yourself easy to leave?”

There was a long pause.

“I’m trying not to. I’m trying to create a future I can live with. A man I can look at in the mirror.” He got quiet, then said, “After football . . .” He started and stopped several times. “I don’t talk about this much.”

Another pause.

I waited.

“Everyone around me assumes I’ll go into coaching or broadcasting. The obvious football-adjacent things. But I don’t want that. I want to build my foundation and address food insecurity. I want it to be bigger, a company that can run without me.”

“But you’re not retiring now. You’ve got another ten years at least.”

There was silence on the other end, just the sound of the sheets.

“Maybe. But here’s the thing. When I’m on the field, I know who I am. I’ve been doing it my entire life, and I’m good at it. But football ends. It ends for everyone, and I think a lot of guys spend the last chapter of their careers terrified of what’s coming.” He paused. “I don’t want to be terrified of it. I want to be ready, and I want to be proud of what I did.”

“Are you getting ready now?”

“Yes. The foundation is the start. But I want—” He stopped. “I want a life that is gratifying when I’m not in uniform. I want to be someone worth knowing when there’s no game on Sunday. Football has been my life for a long time. I think I might be ready for it not to be.”