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“Sir,” the woman said again.

He let go.

He picked up his duffel and handed the woman his boarding pass, and he walked to the door of the jetway. He stopped there. He turned around and looked back at her, one more time.

The night before Thanksgiving, at this same airport, he’d stood by the window and lifted his hand while she boarded.

She lifted hers.

Then he walked down the jetway, and the woman shut the door behind him.

Nicole stood at the window. She watched them pull the jetway back. She watched the plane ease away from the gate and roll out toward the runway, and she watched it get smaller, and then she watched the sky where it had been.

Her hand was on the little gold heart at her throat.

She didn’t let go of it. And she never would.

Epilogue

Drew had stopped feeling much of anything somewhere over Tennessee.

He’d sat in a window seat with his forehead against the plastic and watched Alabama turn into clouds, and at some point the hurt in his chest had just gone quiet. He didn’t know when exactly. He’d waited for it to come back the whole flight, and in the cab, and that night in the hotel, and it hadn’t. Everything since Thursday had been like that. He talked when people talked to him. He ate when somebody put food in front of him. He shook every hand anybody stuck out at him and smiled every time a camera came up, and none of it got all the way in.

He figured numb was better. Numb, he could work with.

The room backstage at the Paramount Theatre was hot and crowded and smelled like coffee and cologne. There were maybe a dozen of them back there, the guys the league had flown in, every one of them in a suit, every one of them with a table full of family. A TV in the corner showed the stage out front. A guy with a headset kept coming through, and somebody’s mother would start crying.

His dad couldn’t sit still. He kept standing up and walking to the TV and coming back and sitting on the edge of his chair with his knee going a mile a minute. His mom had her hand on Drew’s arm and hadn’t moved it in twenty minutes. She hadn’t said one word about Nicole since she’d gotten to New York. Not one. He didn’t know if that was kindness or relief, and he didn’t have it in him to find out.

MJ was on the phone off to the side, his tie loose, one finger in his other ear. He’d been on it all morning.

When the picks finally started, Tariq went fourth.

Drew watched it on the TV, happy for him the same way he’d been at the Heisman, and when Tariq came past their table on his way to the stage with his family losing their minds behind him, Drew stood up and caught his hand and pulled him in.

“Go get it, bro,” he said.

“See you on Sundays, Kiernan.”

Fifth. Sixth. Seventh. Drew sat with his hands folded between his knees and watched the names go up on the screen, a tackle, then a linebacker, then a receiver from a school out West. He knew all of them. He’d played against two. He was happy for each one of them.

MJ hung up the phone.

He didn’t say anything. He just walked over and put a hand on Drew’s shoulder and squeezed it once, and then the guy with the headset was coming through the door, and he was looking right at their table.

On the TV, the commissioner was at the podium. “With the ninth pick in the 1996 NFL Draft, the Los Angeles Renegades select . . . Drew Kiernan, quarterback, Drayton University.”

The room went loud.

Los Angeles. The man in the camel coat at pro day, who’d stood by the end zone all morning without writing down a single thing until that last throw.

Drew didn’t move. He sat there for one second after they said his name, waiting to feel it. Then he turned and looked at his father. His dad was crying. Not a little. He had both hands over his face, and his shoulders were shaking, and when he finally took his hands down, he was a mess. Drew got up and grabbed him, and his dad held on so hard Drew’s back cracked.

“You did it,” his dad kept saying into his shoulder. “You did it, son.”

Every early morning in the cold. Every throw in the street in front of their house. Every silent ride home after a bad game, and every overtime check his folks brought home, and the knee his old man blew out in Columbus and never got over. All of it was right there in the way his father was holding on to him, and Drew held on back and let him have it. It was real, and he was glad as hell he’d done it for his dad.

It just didn’t reach the place it should’ve. That part of him had shut off the night Nicole ended it, and it hadn’t come back on.