I leave the hospital before William wakes up because if he opens his eyes and reaches for me, I won't go. And I have to go.
I sat with him most of the night, curled in the plastic chair beside his bed with my jacket balled up as a pillow, watching the monitor blink green like a promise I'm not sure it can keep.
The nurses told me to go home and sleep around two a.m. Yet when I got home, I couldn’t sleep anyway.
I stared at my ceiling running numbers that don't add up no matter how I arrange them.
Four weeks. Two hundred thousand dollars. A bank account with enough to cover maybe half a month's rent. And no one to call who could write a check with that many zeros.
I drive to the facility in yesterday's clothes with a coffee stain on my collar and an apology rehearsing itself on a loop in my head.
Sorry I left mid-shift, Gary. My five-year-old collapsed and got ambulanced to the hospital. Won't happen again.
Except it will happen again.
William's heart doesn't care about my work schedule.
The lobby is bright and smells like lemon cleaner — my cleaner, probably, from yesterday — and I'm halfway to the operations office when the laughter finds me. Not the accidental kind. The aimed kind.
The cheerleader from yesterday, is leaning against the reception counter with three more cheerleaders in matching warm-up jackets, water bottles in manicured hands.
She spots me and her whole face rearranges into something delighted.
"Oh my God." She straightens up. "There she is, towel girl."
The cheerleaders dissolve and one of them actually covers her mouth. She pushes off the counter and turns to face me fully, hip cocked, smile sharpened to a surgical edge.
"We heard about your little performance in the locker room yesterday. What was it — twenty towels? Thirty? Did Morgan make you fold them too, or just crawl around on your hands and knees?"
Oh my God, is that really happening?
Where’re we at, at high school or what?
The girl behind her mimics bending down and picking towels off the floor. The group cracks up as their queen bee tilts her head with mock sympathy.
"Honestly? I'd be embarrassed to show my face after that. But I guess when you need the paycheck that badly..."
She trails off with a shrug that finishes the sentence better than words would.
My keys bite into my palm and I can feel my jaw is wired shut. I'm about to walk past — just walk, don't engage, I can't afford to lose this job over a cheerleader with a personality disorder…
"Anna." Luke's voice cuts across the lobby, casual but edged underneath. "Shouldn't you be stretching? I hear flexibility's the only thing keeping you on the squad these days."
Her smile freezes mid-watt as the other cheerleaders behind her go silent.
Luke walks up beside me with his hands in his jacket pockets, posture loose, expression pleasant while eyes absolutely not. He looks like someone who could pick Anna up and set her outside like a piece of furniture. And they both know it.
"Cute, Matthews." Anna recovers fast, but not fast enough — her neck has gone blotchy under the foundation. "Defending your little charity project?"
"Defending someone who actually showed up for work today." He doesn't even blink. "When's the last time you did anything at this facility besides block the hallway and take selfies?"
Her mouth opens. Closes. She looks at her cheerleaders for backup but none of them are making eye contact anymore.
Anna flips her hair, mutters something venomous to her girls, and they move toward the gymnasium in a cloud of vanilla body spray and wounded pride. Luke watches them go with his arms loose at his sides, still radiating that quiet don't-test-me energy.
When he turns to me, the hardness drops off him instantly. "Hey." He rubs the back of his neck. "I heard about yesterday… The locker room."
There’s a pause before he continues, looking genuinely uncomfortable, like the information landed on him wrong and he hasn't figured out where to put it.
"I'm sorry about that, Mia. I was in a team meeting upstairs, if I'd known…" He shakes his head. "That's not okay, I'll talk to them."
"Don't." The word comes out sharper than I mean it to. "It'll just make it worse."
He looks like he wants to argue. His jaw works around something, then lets it go. "How are you doing?" A beat. "Really doing."
The way he says it really tells me he can see straight through every brick I've stacked up this morning. So I crack. Not crying — I don't have the hydration for crying — but the words come tumbling out raw and too fast.
"He collapsed while I was mopping floors at the stadium and by the time I got there he was already hooked up to machines."
"Jesus, Mia…"
"His valve is calcifying." I press my palms against the table. "His heart is compensating but it won't compensate forever and the surgery costs two hundred thousand dollars that insurance won't cover."
The number hangs between us. It sounds fake out loud — monopoly money, a figure from someone else's catastrophe.
"Two hundred thousand," Luke says quietly.
"And I have about four hundred in my checking account. So…"
He doesn't interrupt. His face goes still — not blank, but held, like he's absorbing the weight of it and deciding where to carry it.
He's quiet for a long moment, then says, "We'll figure it out. I'll help however I can."
I almost laugh, because what's he going to do, sell a kidney?
But the look on his face stops me — he means it. He'd sell the kidney if I’d asked him to. And that’s the problem.
"Also," I say, and my voice shifts into something harder, "you could've mentioned that Jared Morgan plays here."
He blinks, genuinely confused. "I thought you knew. Mia, he's everywhere. ESPN, Sports Illustrated — he's literally the most talked-about quarterback in the league."
A short, bitter laugh scrapes out of me. "I've been a little busy keeping my kid alive to watch football highlights."
Luke goes quiet, looking at his shoes, then back at me, choosing his words carefully — the way people do when they're trying not to say something worse.
"Look, be careful with him." Luke's voice drops. He glances toward the facility doors like the walls might be listening.
"He's not the same guy from high school. Not in a good way."
"How not-good are we talking?"
"Parties every weekend. Different women every night. There were drug rumors last season — DUIs swept under the rug." He crosses his arms, and something flickers across his face that might be disgust or might be something more complicated.
"The media loves him because he makes great TV. The people who actually know him keep their distance."
"And Coach?"
"Coach protects him because he wins games." He shakes his head. "Off the field? He's a wreck. And he doesn't care who he takes down with him."
I think about Jared's hand on my waist yesterday.
The blankness in his eyes. The way he dropped that towel at my feet like I was entertainment.
"It doesn't matter." I pull my hair back, twist it into a knot. "He looked right through me yesterday. Same as he did ten years ago. He has no idea who I am and I honestly don't care anymore."
I grab my lanyard off the bench where I left it. "I've got bigger things to worry about than Jared Morgan."
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