The words weren’t spoken, but I heard them anyway, loud and clear.
You can’t.
My body obeyed before my mind caught up, stopping mid-stride like I’d been yanked back by a rope. My arms fell uselessly at my sides, my hands opening and closing like I didn’t know what to do with them now that I couldn’t reach for her.
Couldn’t help her.
Couldn’t do a damn thing.
My breath came out rough, uneven, like it didn’t belong to me as I just stood there and watched.
She tried to give me a smile, like it was her job to reassure me when she was the one injured. But that smile was small and weak and nothing like the ones she usually gave me, nothing like the ones that lit up her whole face. This one barely made it past her lips before it faltered, before the pain pulled it back down again.
It gutted me.
And then she was turning away.
“Hey.”
The word came from Kyle, his hand finding my shoulder. He frowned at me, looking from me to Emily and back again.
“She’ll be all right,” he promised me. “Relax, man. Trainers got her.”
He gave me a little shake, but I could see it in his eyes.
He was wondering why I cared so much.
He could see right through the bullshit.
The trainers guided Emily toward the tunnel, their hands steady at her back, their voices low as they talked her through it, and I stood there like I was anchored to the turf, like if I moved now I might shatter completely.
She didn’t look back again, and she didn’t need to.
I stayed right where she left me.
Helmet in my hand. Heart tripping in my chest.
And when the whistle blew and the team started moving, when it was time to lock in, to focus, to do the one thing I’d built my entire life around—
I didn’t know how.
Not when it felt like the most important part of me had just been walked off that field.
Emily
“Emily? Did you hear me?”
I blinked.
The voice was near. It was beside me, perhaps. Or above me. It was somewhere close.
But I was under water, and it came from the surface, and I couldn’t find it in me to swim and kick my way up there, too.
I sat reclined on the green velvet couch Darcy had insisted on when we moved into our open-plan apartment — bright and airy but pieced together, like neither of us had quite decided to stay — a pillow tucked under my right arm, which was held stable by an ugly, rigid cast.
I stared at my knees like they were responsible for all of it, or like they’d have answers for how to go back in time and change it all.
Everything replayed in flashes, cued by the rhythmic beating of my heart.
