The bricks that Greer toppled over with her simple question went right back into the wall, and it was the first time I wondered if that one night with Emmett would eventually morph into a painful memory. If it would become the only tangible glimpse of a future that wasn’t mine to have.
It wasn’t nearly enough. And in moments like that one, it was almost too much.
That was when I stopped watching ESPN entirely.
June turned into July, and as the start of training camps loomed, I knew he’d disappear into the regular season.
My mom called and said that Tim was going in for some tests. A cough that wouldn’t go away, and simple scratches on his arm that weren’t healing right. My stomach sank and my chest went tight—we’d done this before.
I cried in the shower again that we might have to do it again.
And I wanted to call Emmett. Tell him I was scared. That I wasn’t sure what my family would do if the foundation of it crumbled.
But I didn’t. Because it wasn’t fair.
After four months, I learned to live with the cracks, walk carefully over them so that I didn’t cause further damage.
But it was that month, at the tip of the heat of the summer, when everything shifted again.
Emmett
“I don’t want to have this conversation again, Ward.”
I set my jaw, staring down my head coach and the GM. They both looked exhausted, and given I’d tracked them down every single week for the last four months, they would look exhausted at the sight of me.
“Neither do I,” I told him.
“Then how about you stop interrupting our weekly meeting and drop it?”
“We’re gonna have this conversation until I make headway,” I told them. “He is making bad long-term decisions, and he refuses to talk to me about my future here.”
Coach Lopez eyed me from the chair where he sat with his arms folded. “You mean the future you don’t want to have here,” he said.
I took a deep breath, clasping my hands tightly where they hung between my legs. “You have solutions for this position outside of me. You have two backups who would fit incredibly well into the system we’ve built.” I held his gaze. “If anything, Darius is a better runner than I am. Given our trades have weakened our O-line, he’d probably do even better than I can when the pocket collapses.”
“You trying to give someone else your job?”
I let out a deep breath. “No. As long as I am here and wearing this jersey, I will do everything in my power to win games.”
“We’ve won a lot together.”
At Coach’s statement, I nodded. There was no disputing it.
Don, our long-term GM, stayed silent, twirling his fancy pen and generally looking bored with the entire conversation. He probably was bored. The first time I asked if they would go to Ned for me and ask if he’d entertain offers from another team, I got an earful of choice four-letter words that just about blistered the paint off the wall.
Don, just like Adaline, did not like being surprised.
Coach Lopez pinched the bridge of his nose, and I recognized his expression. It was the look he got on his face when we did something stupid in practice or when a rookie ran the wrong route, and I threw an interception. It was the look of someone who couldn’t control any facet of what was laid out in front of him.
“What do you want us to do, Ward?” Don asked. He steepled his hands over his stomach and gave me a droll look. “We’ve acknowledged your request. Just like we’ve done every single week. There’s no motivation on our side to let you go, and we know you well enough that you’d never sabotage the team in order to get a bigger offer somewhere else.”