William was better this morning. Not good — good is a word that doesn't live in our vocabulary anymore — but better.
He ate half a bowl of oatmeal, asked about the cartoon dog on his hospital gown, and waved at me through the window when I left. His small hand against the glass, fingers spread wide.
I carry that image like a talisman all the way to the parking lot.
Olivia's on shift today and texted me a photo of William's breakfast tray with a thumbs up.
Liv: go to work, I've got him.
That loosened something behind my sternum. For the first time in days the loop — four weeks, two hundred thousand, four weeks, two hundred thousand — is quieter.
Not gone, but at least quieter.
So today I can almost pretend I'm just a woman going to work.
I sit in the breakroom and stare at my phone. Ron's number is still in my contacts, wedged between a pizza place that closed last year and the number for William's pharmacy.
My thumb hovers over it as thoughts in my head keep spiralling.
He's William's father. Two hundred thousand dollars. He should know. He should care. He should be sitting in that hospital room instead of playing house with a woman whose biggest medical concern is probably a yoga injury.
But the memory of his voice the last time we spoke wraps around my throat like a hand.
This is your mess, Mia. Figure it out.
Eight years of marriage and that's his summary. His son's heart is failing and Ron's parting contribution was a diagnosis of blame. He chose Jessica. He chose a life where William is a line item he crossed out.
William is mine. Only mine.
I lock the phone, the screen goes dark as Ron's number disappears and I tell myself that's all it deserves.
The facility is already buzzing — the team just finished morning practice and the locker room looks like a bomb went off in a laundry basket. I move through the wreckage with my bin, gathering sweat-soaked jerseys and compression shirts from benches, floors.
A few players are still lingering, half-dressed, loud. One of them tosses his practice shorts across the room toward my bin like it's a basketball hoop and misses by three feet. His teammates cheer anyway, like that was the point.
I pick the shorts up off the floor without looking at him.
Another player holds his jersey out to me between two fingers, nose wrinkled. "Careful, sweetheart. That one's extra ripe."
Laughter ripples through the group and I take it, keep moving.
My hands know what to do. My face knows what expression to hold. The rest of me is somewhere else entirely — in a hospital room, watching a monitor blink green.
Then someone steps directly into my path and I almost walk into his chest.
He's holding his practice jersey in one hand, still damp, and extends it toward me — but when I reach for it, he doesn't let go. When I look up, it’s Jared. He's frowning at my face with the kind of focus that makes my stomach drop into my shoes, something clicking behind his eyes like tumblers in a lock.
"Wait." His grip tightens on the jersey. "Haven't we met before? Like, way back before. Your face is really familiar actually."
"I don't think so." I lie smoothly and pull the jersey from his grip.
Flat voice. Flat expression. Nothing to see here.
But he's not letting it go and tilts his head, studying me the way you study a word on the tip of your tongue. Then his gaze drops to the name stitched on my work polo.
He reads it and immediately looks back at my face.
"Mia…" he says slowly, tasting it.
His eyes narrow, and then — I watch it happen in real time — his gaze shifts to Luke's locker across the room and the tumblers click.
"Hold on. Luke brought you here, right? Luke, Luke..." He snaps his fingers. "You're Luke's friend from high school. The one who used to drool over me." The grin spreads like a crack in glass. "Bleachers girl!"
My jaw could cut diamond.
When I say nothing, he leans against the locker beside me, arms crossed. His eyes traveling over the oversized polo, the bin of dirty jerseys, the lanyard clipped to my chest.
"What happened, bleachers girl? Husband not as loaded as daddy was if you're working here?"
The words land in my ribcage one by one, precise as thrown knives. I look him dead in the eye.
"My father died. The man is now an ex. Life changes."
I said it flat, factual, as if daring him to laugh. Something flickers across his face, a half-second crack in the performance, there and gone like heat lightning, before he recovers quickly.
He leans closer and his proximity is a weapon he wields like he was born holding it.
"So the crush was real then." His voice drops, conspiratorial, playing to the audience. "How many diaries did you fill with my face on them, huh? Little hearts around my portrait? Did you dot the ‘a’ in Jared with a star?"
The players within earshot are howling while my vision blurs at the edges, nails cut crescents into my palms around the jersey in my hands.
"Jared." Luke's voice slices through the noise from across the room — sharp, nothing playful in it. "That's enough."
He's walking toward us from the corridor, still in his uniform, face set in something harder than I've ever seen on Luke Matthews.
Jared straightens up and raises both hands in mock surrender. "Relax, Matthews. Just catching up with an old friend."
Luke positions himself between me and Jared without making it obvious — a half-step to the left, his shoulder angled like a wall.
"She's here to work. Let her work."
The two of them hold eye contact for a beat longer than comfortable. Something passes between them that has nothing to do with my job description and everything to do with territory. And I'm standing close enough to feel the voltage of it against my skin.
Then Jared shrugs, grabbing his bag, and walks out.
Tossing over his shoulder without turning, "Good seeing you again, bleachers girl."
I make it to the staff bathroom before I break. Lock the stall and press my forehead against the cool metal door and breathe in counts of four.
My hands won't stop shaking.
The boy I drew in my diary for years just used those drawings as a weapon in front of twenty men. And the worst part — the part that makes me want to rip the sink off the wall — is that for one second when he caught my eye, my stupid traitorous pulse did the exact same thing it did ten years ago.
I hate him for remembering. I hate him more for not remembering sooner. For needing to read my name off a shirt like I'm a patient in a waiting room.
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