Tongue tucked between her teeth, she dug into her task with gusto.
Rebecca smiled as she approached. “Thank you, Emmett. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here.”
“Anything you need, you know that.” I held up my phone. “I skipped all the press, so I’m sure a few other guys will be here soon. What about your family?”
She ran a hand through her hair. “Malcolm’s mom is getting on a flight now. It’ll be hours until she’s here.”
We left Gabriela by the chair and moved a few feet away. “They tell you anything?”
Rebecca nodded. “They’ll need to do spinal stabilization surgery in the next day or two. They couldn’t promise he’d ever walk again, though,” she said, voice wavering.
I settled a hand on her shoulder. “One day at a time, okay? Malcolm is so damn stubborn. If anyone can prove them wrong, it’s him.”
“I know.” The tears in her eyes spilled over. “Wheelchair or walking or limping, as long as he’s here. I know he won’t feel this way, but I don’t care if this ends his football career. I want him alive. Everything else is just details.”
A nurse approached, gently calling Rebecca’s name, so I took my seat next to Gabriela again.
She climbed on my lap while I showed her how I was going to build her a castle with a tower on each corner.
“Those are the battlements, and if we make a bigger wall encircling it, then this will be the outer bailey.”
“Pink battle… battlemans?” she asked. Her elbow jabbed me in the ribs as she scooted forward to watch what I was doing.
“If we have the right sizes, sure.”
As we formed our structure, and G carefully placed the bricks down along our foundation, I watched Rebecca speak in hushed tones to the nurse.
What if that was me?
But this time, instead of the hollow ache or icy hands, it was just a moment—quick and fierce—of realization.
There would be no one slumped against the hospital wall saying a prayer. I’d have no one pacing the hallway until their name was called.
Malcolm and I were the same age. Started the same season.
And he had a wife and a daughter waiting for him. Two people who were his whole world.
I tried to snap a pink brick into place on the back tower, and my hand trembled. The last time I built something like this to cheer someone up, it was in a dark kitchen in my parents’ beach house, the night before the draft.
I did it because it made her smile, and I liked it when she did that.
I hadn’t thought of her smile in so long. There was no point.
I’d chased something else through college and into the pros. But sitting in that hospital waiting room, I wasn’t exactly sure what I had to show for it.
I had records. Trophies. A name that stood separately from my father’s.
My family loved me, and they were proud of me.
But they were across the country.
Every night, I came home to a beautiful, empty house, and it didn’t bother me. But with G on my lap, and my friend’s spine injured to a point that he might never walk again, I wondered how I’d feel if I was in his place.
The seed of a thought started building at the back of my head, something growing in form and shape, that I couldn’t quite grasp onto. Brown eyes and a big smile, a laugh that always warmed my chest.
Someone who looked at me like I was important—not because of what I could do. Adaline Wilder looked at me that way because she liked me. Me. Not Emmett Ward, the football player. Not Emmett Ward—son of the legendary player and coach.