Page 47 of Here We Go Again

There are people all over the track, and my stopping is clearly impacting the flow of traffic, people moving around us, passing us on either side.

“Here,” Theo says gently, touching my elbow. He guides me off the track onto the grassy edge of the football field.

“I’ll keep walking,” Mia calls. “I’m not sure we have any other team members out here. Are you good?”

I nod. “I’m good. I’ll catch up in a sec.”

“Sorry,” Theo says. “I should have waited until your break.”

“No, it’s fine,” I say, looking over at him. “But aren’t you supposed to be walking too?”

“Nah. Not yet. Not until later.”

I slowly open the envelope and pull out the pictures. The first one is my mom and me at the starting line of our 5k, wearing the Bradley family t-shirts Theo ordered for the event. We’re smiling wide, arms around each other, and it makes my heart ache the tiniest bit.

I really need to visit my parents. I haven’t seen them since Christmas, and that’s much too long.

The next one is my entire family. Mom, Dad, me, Alyssa, Gigi. Then there’s one of my dad making faces at my mom. Another of my sisters squirting each other with their water bottles. Mom laughing. Me laughing. All five of us standing and flexing our muscles like we’re bodybuilders.

There’s one of me with Alyssa and Gigi dressed up for Halloween, standing in the entrance to the corn maze, and another with our faces painted for a football game.

Theo is conspicuously absent in all the photos, but I know he was there for every single one of these moments.

“Obviously, I also have a bunch of the two of us,” he says. “But I thought it might be weird for me to give those to you. I can, if you want them; I just didn’t want to be … too forward, I guess? I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

I flip to the last photo, and this one is of Theo and me. I hold it up. “You missed one.”

We’re leaning against his truck in the photo. He has one arm around me, and the other is raised to take a selfie. He’s looking directly at the camera, his face boyish and handsome, but I’m not. Instead, my head is thrown back in laughter, eyes squinting, mouth open in a wide smile.

I can’t remember what he said that made me laugh so hard, but I do remember the moment. I’d ridden my bike over to my grandmother’s house—she only lived a couple of miles away from my parents—and I’d texted Theo to come and pick me up, claiming it was too hot to ride home.

Probably I just wanted an excuse to see him, not that I ever needed one. Hockey was the only thing that ever kept us apart. When he wasn’t practicing or traveling for games, we were pretty much inseparable.

“Sorry,” Theo says over my shoulder. “I didn’t know that one was there.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m glad it is.”

“That’s your grandma’s house, right?”

I run my finger over the edge of the photo. “Yeah, it is.”

“You made me come and pick you up,” he says.

“I asked you to. I didn’t make you do anything.”

He chuckles. “You could have. I think I would have driven to California to pick you up if you’d wanted me to.”

My grip tightens on the photos. He would have. Which is why losing him was so painful. Because we went from that kind of devotion … to nothing. Basically overnight.

“How is your grandma?” Theo asks, and my chest tightens, a sharp ache running from my heart down into my gut.

“She passed away,” I say, my voice catching the slightest bit. “Last year.”

He’s quiet for a beat before he says, “Becca, I’m really sorry.”

I shrug and will myself not to get emotional. Losing my grandmother to Alzheimer’s was one of the hardest things I’ve experienced. She was diagnosed my junior year of high school, but she lived close enough that as long as we checked on her daily, it wasn’t too bad. Not at first.

But her disease progressed quickly. It wasn’t long before she needed full-time care, first at home, then eventually in a memory care facility.