Page 25 of Coming Home

"I was in the stands for your hundred-meter freestyle at the '18 Games," she said, her voice like dry parchment. "The cleanest underwater transition I've seen in a generation." She released my hand with a sharp nod.

"Brandt, you're four minutes late. Lane four is yours."

That was the entirety of the exchange. No hushed questions about where I'd vanished to or why my name had dropped off the qualifiers. Just an acknowledgment of a girl who used to be fast, and an immediate return to the clock. I decided right then that I would lay down my life for her.

As Ralph disappeared into the locker room, I scouted the perimeter for the farthest point from the water. I found a metal bench pushed against the back cinderblock wall, a safe forty feet away from the shimmering edge of the pool. I sat down, pulling my knees into the dark fleece of the hoodie, locking my arms around my shins like a shield.

The pool was a monster—Olympic-sized, eight lanes of deep, chemical blue that used to look like home and now looked like a liquid grave. A few early-morning Masters swimmers were moving through their sets, their rhythmic, hollow splashes creating that specific, echoing soundtrack that had narrated the first two decades of my life. Iris paced the wet concrete with a clipboard, her corrections ringing out in a voice that didn't need to shout to be terrifying.

I was hyperventilating. I pressed my palms flat against the cold metal of the bench, forcing my mind to focus on the solid texture of the iron.

You're on dry land. You're forty feet away. The water can't reach you here.

But the logic was useless against the chemistry of trauma.

Then Ralph emerged from the tunnel, and every thought in my head went blank.

I knew he was large. I'd known him since he was an awkward, gangly teenager whose shoulders grew three inches over a single summer. But knowing the dimensions of a man and seeing them laid bare in the stark, unforgiving light of an elite facility are two different countries.

He was golden, massive, and carved from decades of relentless, violent discipline against water. Every muscle in his back, the deep V of his torso, the heavy breadth of his chest—it was a body built for purpose. He walked toward lane four with the loose, swaying grace of an apex predator that spent more of its life wet than dry.

He caught me staring.

He paused at the block of lane four, his fingers adjusting his cap, and looked directly across forty feet of concrete straight into my eyes. And then he winked.

My entire face caught fire. I dropped my gaze to my lap, staring at my dead phone screen with an intensity that should have cracked the glass, my thumbs scrolling through nothingness.

He dove. The sound of his entry was a clean thwip—barely a splash—and then he was simply gone into the blue. Lap after lap.

I kept my eyes glued to the plastic of my phone. I refused to look up. I would rather die on this bench than give his ego the satisfaction of an audience.

But the rhythm of elite swimming is a hypnotic, visceral thing when you have the sport in your blood, and despite every defense I'd built, my eyes eventually drifted back to the water. I tracked his stroke. The elegance of his hip rotation. The way his shoulders rolled over the surface, working in flawless, fluid harmony with the water rather than fighting it.

"Nice swim, little mermaid."

I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing the memory back into the dark, pressing my thumb into the glass.

Then the music stopped.

The rhythmic splashing, the breathing, the consistent, heavy beat of his stroke—the entire facility went hauntingly silent. I blinked, my gaze flying to lane four.

He was at the far wall, deep in the twelve-foot end, face down on the surface of the water, his long arms floating limply at his sides. He wasn't moving. Not an inch.

My phone slipped from my fingers, clattering on the concrete.

"Ralph?" I whispered.

Nothing. His broad back drifted with the residual current of his own lane, his body rotating with a sickening, slow-motion inertia. His face remained submerged.

"RALPH!"

I was on my feet before the scream had even cleared my teeth. Iris was at the opposite end of the complex, her back turned as she barked instructions at a backstroker. The other swimmers had their heads down, locked in their own private hells. Ralph was floating like a corpse in the deep end, the water was swallowing him, and my lungs seized—I couldn't think, I couldn't see, I couldn't breathe⁠—

I kicked off my flats.

The fear was a wall of iron between me and the edge—a monster built from every failure, every night in James's shower, every morning the water rejected me. I had sworn I would never touch a pool again. I had built a fortress out of my absence. And right there, right across the blue lane lines, was the thing that had destroyed my life.

But Ralph was in it. Ralph was face down, and the terror of a world without Ralph Brandt in it was suddenly so much larger than the terror of the water that the wall simply shattered into dust.