Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 115577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 578(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 578(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
Braden didn’t respond. He was so still I wondered if he was breathing at all.
“Emily,” Claire continued, “you’re going to be at the forefront of this situation whether you want to be or not. We have a lot to figure out in terms of messaging, media, and how we move forward.”
Each word felt like a weight added to my chest.
“But let me be clear,” she said, her voice firming. “We are not firing anyone over this.”
Air rushed back into my lungs. “Really?” I couldn’t help how pathetic I sounded.
“For now,” Coach Palmer added. “We’re not trying to be the bad guys. You both have earned your place here and we want you to stay. But no one is happy about this — least of all the ones who now have to work tirelessly to clean it up.”
“Consider this your warning. Your one and only warning,” Claire said. “You both signed contracts that include a no fraternization clause. It exists for a reason.”
My pulse stuttered.
Wait… were they going to—
“What happens between players and dancers doesn’t stay private,” Coach Palmer said. “It becomes a headline. A distraction. A liability.”
Claire leaned forward slightly. “So whatever has been happening between you two—” her eyes flicked between us, sharp and knowing, “—it needs to stop. Immediately.”
The words hit harder than anything else she’d said.
Again, I found myself wishing for it to only be me who had to suffer.
Take the job, I silently begged the universe. Take my place on the squad. Take my uniform and all my ties to this team.
But please, don’t take him.
“Cool it off,” Claire finished. “Before this becomes something none of us can control. Because if there’s a next time, someone will lose their job.”
I could feel Braden beside me, close enough to touch, impossibly far away.
Suddenly, his phone rang.
The sharp sound sliced through the tension.
All of us startled, turning toward him as he fumbled it out of his pocket. He glanced at the screen and everything in his expression changed.
Color drained from his face, and he answered without explanation to any of us, the phone to his ear. “Hello?” His eyes slid to mine, and the panic I saw there gutted me like a fish. “I’m on my way.”
He lurched out of the chair, snagging his jacket and bolting for the door.
“Braden?” I said, pushing to my feet. “What’s going on?”
Claire and Coach Palmer looked just as thrown, the entire conversation derailed in an instant.
Braden didn’t look at any of us. He threw the door open and flew through it.
“It’s Ginny,” he said.
And then he was gone.
Braden
Every beep of the machine was a knife to my gut, a brutal reminder that my own heart needed to keep beating, too.
I sat at the edge of Ginny’s bed, her hand clutched in mine, pale and smooth and blessedly warm. She was warm.
She was alive.
Her hand was dead weight in mine, though — heavy and motionless. She was sedated and intubated, her chest rising and falling in time with the eerie whoosh of the ventilator, a steady mechanical breath that didn’t belong to her. There was tape on her pale face, blue veins present on her closed eyelids, and her lips were chapped and raw.
The room was sterile, though thankfully the lights were dimmed now that we were stable, and it smelled of sanitizer and plastic. The ventilator filled the silence in a way her voice used to.
I tried to focus on the positive — she was alive, she was stable, she was in good care. But it was impossible to have that mindset for long before the truth of it all would creep in.
Ginny had suffered acute respiratory failure brought on by a cold, and my parents had the worst scare of their life.
It was hard to stomach when they walked me through how it all had happened, how Ginny had struggled to cough, how her breathing had become labored, her communication less frequent, until it stopped altogether. My mom looked like a ghost when she told me how Ginny had pleaded wordlessly, her eyes wide, telling my mom she couldn’t breathe in the only way she knew how.
It had been a mad rush after that — a call to 9-1-1 and an ambulance straight to the emergency room. Her pulse ox was seventy-nine. They’d intubated her as soon as the gurney had been pushed through the doors of the ER.
It was all a haze from there — doctors explaining what had happened and what would come next, their words blurring behind the weight of my parents’ fear until none of it made sense. Mom burst into tears when I arrived, Dad wrapping me in a fierce hug, and we’d taken shifts with Ginny ever since, making sure she was never alone.
On the outside, I was steady. I held my sister’s hand, talked to her, tried to make her laugh even though I knew she was sedated. I hoped maybe she could hear me through it, that maybe I could provide comfort in whatever dreamless sleep she was experiencing.