Page 27 of Her Coach

I put the phone down and sat in my office for another few minutes, looking at nothing in particular.

Then I gathered my things and went home.

11

BRYNN

Waking up to my mother crying in the shower was always the worst wake-up call on a Monday morning.

Granted, she did her best to keep it under wraps. But even in a house this size, sound carried in the mornings.

Especially once Mom really got going.

The second I heard her struggling to sniffle, I threw the covers off me. Moving back home to help Mom with her grief sounded like a good idea. That was until I figured out that she’d carried it pretty much every day since Dad died. She deserved more than this. More than crying in the shower just to wake herself up.

I slipped out of bed and reached for my fuzzy red robe. I slung it around my shoulders, trudging out of my room and heading down the hallway. I inched Mom’s bedroom door open and cringed at the stuttered breaths she took behind the closed shower door. As steam slipped from beneath the crack, I shuffled up to the door and rapped against it with my knuckles.

“Mom?” I asked groggily.

I heard her clear her throat before she fixed her voice. “Morning, princess. Did I wake you?”

She only ever called me ‘princess’ on the days where she couldn’t get Dad off her mind. After all, that’s what he always called me.

His little princess.

“You okay in there?” I asked as I wrapped my arms around my chest.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said breathlessly in that way that told me she was lying through her morning breath. “Just getting out some stress.”

I paused. “Mom, I’m twenty-six. I know when you’re upset.”

Mom sighed. “Princess, I told you, it’s just⁠—”

I didn’t let her get away with it, though. “How can I help, Mom?”

The heavy sigh she heaved as she turned off the shower water told me she’d already given in. We did this dance a lot. She woke up crying, I found her in some unraveled state somewhere in her personal space, and then we talked around it before she finally let me help.

I wasn’t talking around it this time, though.

We had to take steps forward.

Even if Mom wanted to stay planted in the past.

“Mom,” I said a bit too sharply for a Monday morning.

“Can you go open the stadium and get Coach Colton his keys, if he hasn’t found them already? I’m not sure if he opened his desk to find them there. Men sometimes don’t poke around in places like women do.”

I nodded. “Anything else?”

“Just that I’ll be in the stadium office by lunch time after all of my morning meetings are done here at my home office.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “If you’re having that bad of a day, maybe coming down to the stadium will help perk you up a bit. When’s your first meeting of the day? We could make some coffee in the⁠—”

She whipped the door open, and I swear to hell on high, it scared the shit out of me. Sometimes Mom walked with all of the confidence in the world, clicking those heels across any surface she walked upon so that all heard her coming. Other times, she moved as silent as a mouse.

I didn’t even realize she’d gotten out of the shower and put her robe on in the first place.

“Morning,” I said as she walked past me.