Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
When he finally draws back from me, I hold my breath.
I hold it, and I hope, and yes, I pray, the way you pray for a thing you already know in your bones you’ve lost, that this once, just this once, he’ll stay. That he’ll gather me back in against his chest the way he used to and let me lay my palm over his heart and count the beats of it. That he’ll fall asleep with his face buried in my hair and wake me in the morning the same way he woke me tonight, and that somewhere in the staying I’ll find the man I married again, the man I’m no longer entirely sure ever existed anywhere outside my own wishing.
But he doesn’t stay.
He never stays anymore, and there is no reason on earth he would start tonight, of all nights, and still the not-staying cracks me open all over again. All I can do is keep my eyes shut and make my breathing go slow and even and counterfeit sleep, so that he won’t know I’m lying here awake to feel him leave, so that I get to keep the one small scrap of pride I have left to my name. I listen to the rustle of clothes in the dark. I listen to him dress, unhurried, the movements of a man with nowhere he particularly needs to be and certainly no reason to linger here. Then his footsteps, soft and even on the carpet, crossing the room away from me. And then the door.
I start to cry in earnest the moment it clicks shut behind him.
I don’t understand how this happened. I don’t understand any of it, no matter how many times I turn it over in the dark, and it never once comes right, because I truly believed my father when he took my hand in both of his in that medicine-smelling room and told me Trey was the right one for me, that he would come to love me in his own time if I was only patient enough with him. Dad was never wrong about people. It was the very thing he was famous for, all up and down the league, the eye that could look at a raw untested rookie and see the franchise he’d grow into ten years out, and he turned that same eye on Trey and on me and saw something there worth spending the last of his strength to arrange. So how is this where it all led. How did the perfect husband and the marriage I never once let myself dream of curdle, in six short months, into a man who wants nothing on earth from me but a child and a clean quiet way out.
If Dad were still alive, I’d go to him. I’d perch on the edge of his big chair the way I always used to and tell him everything, all of it, and ask him how on earth it came to this, and I’d trust whatever he told me to do, no matter how hard it was to sit and hear. He always knew. He always, always knew.
But Dad isn’t here.
And so I find myself reaching for my phone in the dark with shaking hands, my eyes still streaming, before I’ve quite let myself think through what I’m doing or who exactly I’m doing it to, and I send the only message I can think to send to the only person left in the whole world who knew me before all of this, who knew me back when I was simply Richard’s daughter and not anyone’s means to anything at all.
Are you free tomorrow? I need to ask you something.
Chapter Six
Ismile despite everything when I see the way the whole street reacts to Troy the second he unfolds himself out of the back of his limo.
It’s a good corner for it, just off the park, the kind of block where people are used to money but not to fame, and so the ordinary midmorning bustle of it stutters and turns. A woman with a stroller actually stops walking. Two teenagers fumble for their phones. A hot dog vendor leans clear out over his cart to get a look. He’s Manhattan’s favorite, always was and always will be, and as unlikely as it sounds he might honestly be more famous now, a year retired, than he ever was in the jersey. Part of that is the winning, the twelve seasons and the two championships and the easy way he carried my father’s whole franchise up the standings on his back as though it didn’t weigh anything at all. But part of it, lately, is the gossip, because a few weeks ago the paparazzi caught some mysterious brunette slipping out of his building in the small hours before dawn, and the entire city has been busy trying to put a name to her ever since.