Page 37 of Coming Home

She was blind. She was sharp. She was alive.

They were all moving through the gray corridors, managing their hours, drinking terrible coffee, telling jokes, holding onto the skin of the people who loved them. Living. At three in the morning, when fear had me by the throat, I'd built this into something dimmed and tragic, a shadow of the real thing. Watching them cross the corridor, I couldn't find that shadow anywhere.

Still living. Differently, sure, but fully.

I watched them pass, and my throat tightened until it burned, because I couldn't make myself believe that this framework could ever fit my life.

A world without the sharp, bright edges of the lane. A world where the deep, vivid greens I was already losing would be followed by the blues, then the golds, then everything else, until the faces of the people who anchored me became faint smudges I'd have to reconstruct from old data.

Athena's face when she was furious, the way her nose scrunched right before she threw something at me.

Theo's sharp, competitive grin across a locker room.

My mother's small, lined hands, always in motion—folding linen, stirring pots, or pressing against my jaw when I came home.

Emma's face.

That was the loss I couldn't drill for. I'd spent weeks training myself for the dark, bracing for all of it, and every rep broke on the same face.

Her face in the early mornings before she'd had her English breakfast tea—soft, slightly cross, and so beautiful it physically ached to look at her. Her face when she let out a real laugh, a sound still so rare these days that every time it happened I wanted to lock the frame in my mind forever. Her face across the kitchen island over those plastic takeout containers, that tiny, delicate furrow appearing between her eyebrows when she was working through a thought she didn't want me to see. Those blue eyes. The way they went dark and stormy when she was hurt, electric when she was angry, and impossibly deep when she forgot to set the guard.

I'd been in love with Emma Carrow since before I had the vocabulary to describe how deep it ran.

I was seventeen the first night I finally admitted it to myself. She was fifteen. We were down in San Diego for a regional mid-summer selection camp, and she was running butterfly drills in the lane directly to my right.

She surfaced at the wall after a grueling five-hundred-meter set, yanked her white cap and goggles off her face, and let out this huge, full-bodied, unselfconscious laugh at something Theo had yelled from the timing deck.

I realized it was love right then.

I never told her. Not once. I buried it so deep under the weight of loyalty and family and the convenient, safe lie that what I felt was just brotherly protection. I watched her win her gold at sixteen, standing in the front row of the stands, screaming until my throat bled. I watched her go off to college, driving three hours through the mountains every other weekend just to sit in her dining hall and convince myself I was just being a good friend.

I watched her choose James, and the night she walked away from me was the exact night I learned the hardest lesson a man can take: loving a woman doesn't give you the right to save her from her own choices.

But the good years. God, the good years.

Those high school afternoons when we'd clear out the training logs and she'd challenge me to a straight sprint, every single time, knowing her stroke rate couldn't match my reach in freestyle and not giving a single damn because she was the most competitive creature God ever put on the earth.

She'd surface after getting beaten by three body lengths, wipe the chlorine from her eyes, and bark, "Again, Brandt," with that stubborn fury in her voice, and I'd dive back in because refusing her anything was a physical impossibility.

Those long summers at the beach with Theo, the three of us burning our shoulders on towels, sharing a single bag of salt chips, arguing over music until the tide came in.

I'd call her little mermaid just to watch that slow, beautiful flush start at her collarbone and climb all the way to the tips of her ears. She'd throw a handful of dry sand at my chest, or shove my shoulder, or tell me to shut my mouth, but her face always betrayed the line. She loved it. She loved being my mermaid. She just possessed too much pride to say it out loud.

I could see her at seventeen, diving off the gray rocks into the Pacific, her arms locked above her head, her body a flawless, unbroken arc against the sky. I could see her at twenty, standing on the second tier of the podium with a silver medal around her neck, absolutely furious because silver wasn't gold, her chin thrust out, her eyes blazing with blue fire. I could see her at twenty-five—the last time I ever saw her competitive stroke—a qualifier where her times were so far off her personal standard she climbed out of the lane and walked straight to the locker room without looking at a single soul.

I had sat in the upper bleachers with my hands wedged between my knees, wanting to tear down the railing to follow her, and knowing I had no right to enter her dark space.

And soon, I wouldn't be able to see her face at all.

All of it would fade out, one shade of blue at a time, until Emma Carrow was reduced to a voice, a warmth, and a memory I carried in the only square inch of my head the tumor couldn't reach.

My phone vibrated against my hip. I pulled it out, my eyes straining against the glare until the pixels resolved into a name.

Mom.

Her caller ID picture was from last Christmas at our house in Bakersfield—sitting at the oak table, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, smiling at something Athena was doing off-camera. She looked healthy there. Now, her blood pressure had been a dangerous metric for three years, kept under control only by Athena's relentless management. The absolute last thing her heart needed was her son calling from a hospital stairway to tell her the surgery was mandatory, the career was dead, and her boy was going blind.

My thumb hovered over the green acceptance bar. I let it ring. One. Two. Three. Four. The automated voicemail system kicked in, her recorded voice filling my ear for a brief second before I cut the connection and shoved the phone back into my pocket.