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Instead, it followed me.

Then there was the new kid, who had already found himself at odds with several teammates. A conversation with his parents might give me some insight into what was going on outside the field and what might be driving the tension. I saw his last name on the freshman roster.

Jace Walton. A single surname was all it took to pull me up short. A transfer from Austin, Texas. The room had gone strangely quiet around me as the possibilities fell into place, each one heavier than the last. Coincidence would’ve been easier to believe if I hadn’t already known better. Before I could talk myself out of it, I’d opened his file.

Emergency Contact: Cali Walton.

After all these years, she’d come back to Kennedy, and of all the sports she could’ve chosen, she’d enrolled her son on my team. I leaned back in my chair, rubbing a hand over my jaw, but the tension refused to ease. Whether it was confidence, carelessness, or some cruel joke fate had played, I couldn’t say. I only knew every answer left me wishing for a different one.

A sharp knock cracked through, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“Yeah,” I called. Soren leaned against the jamb, arms crossed over his chest. “You look like someone just told you that preschoolers have replaced the team.”

“Worse.”

He stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. “Spill.” I swiveled the screen toward him. He scanned it and slowly looked up. “Well.”

“Don’t start,” I said.

“Cali’s back,” he stated.

“I’m aware.”

“And her kid’s on your team.”

Like I hadn’t just shown him the screen to discover this little nugget of information. I was still processing the fact she had a kid. Cali was a mom. My Cali, except she wasn’t mine anymore.

“Also aware.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Soren’s silence said everything. I couldn’t stay seated. I crossed the office once, turned around and did it again, every step fueled by the restless pull of everything I hadn’t said and everything I still didn’t understand.

“I don’t care,” I said finally. “It’s been fifteen years.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I stopped walking, my feet coming to a halt before I had even fully processed the question running through my mind. Did I care?

The answer came as anger first, sharp and immediate, the kind I had learned to carry so well that I could aim it at almost anything and convince myself it was enough—anger I used for fuel. It was easier than the questions that always followed, easier than admitting there was still a part of me that wondered what happened, where things had gone wrong, and how someone who had once been my entire future could become someone I couldn’t reach at all. Cali left without an explanation, without a goodbye, without giving me even a single conversation to understand why everything we had built suddenly meant nothing to her. One day, we were making plans and talking about the life we were going to have together, mapping out a future that felt so certain I never thought to question whether we would actually get there.

The next day, she was gone. Her phone was disconnected. Her bed was empty. There was no note, no message, no final moment where she looked me in the eye and told me she was walking away, that she’d changed her mind about us. She had disappeared from my life so completely that there were days when it felt like I had imagined it all, like the memories were something I had created because I wanted them to be real.

But they were real. I still had the photos.

They were tucked away where no one else would find them, hidden in a place I told myself I had forgotten about, even though I knew exactly where they were. Every so often, I would pull them out and stare at the two of us frozen in those moments, trying to find some clue I had missed, some warning sign I should have seen, some explanation buried in the way she looked at me.

I kept searching for the place where everything fell apart. Because that was the part I couldn’t understand. How did we go from her looking at me like I was the center of her world, like I was someone she couldn’t imagine living without, to me not being worth a goodbye?

“You want me to sit in on the meeting?” Soren asked, his voice deliberately casual, though I knew him well enough to know he was watching me more closely than he wanted me to realize.

“No.”

The response came out faster than I intended, because the last thing I needed was someone else in that room watching me try to pretend I was unaffected. I had spent years convincing everyone, including myself, that I was fine, and I wasn’t about to have an audience when that illusion finally cracked.

“You sure?” His brows pulled together as he studied my face.