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Chapter One
BURKE
“It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to do it, Burke,” my dad told me once. One of the many times growing up when I bitched about practice being too hard, or not wanting to go back out onto the field. “Doing the hard stuff when you don’t want to is going to make you the best version of yourself.”
What a horrible fucking moment to remember this piece of advice.
Recalling it at that particular time didn’t cause anger, or even annoyance. It induced the kind of dread that had my blood running in icy-cold chunks through my veins, because there was nothing I could do to prepare for what was coming next. Something I’d learned all too well the last three months of my life.
I didn’t want to do this.
And I had no choice.
As I watched the lawyer fumble with a massive binder, shuffling through page after page before he delivered one of those life-exploding bombs, worry settled like an iron weight in my stomach.
It was a feeling rooted in loss, the kind that you couldn’t ignore and could hardly breathe through.
I had a feeling that whatever was coming out of this wrinkle-faced lawyer’s mouth would shift the road in front of me irrevocably.
He skimmed through another page. “My apologies. We had a hard time finding the trust documents when your friend and his wife passed.”
That dread curdled dangerously under my skin at his words. What a sanitized term.
It was clean and clinical and didn’t cause any damage.
They didn’tpass.
Their car wrapped around a tree trunk because a drunk driver crossed into their lane, and in a crush of metal and glass, they left behind a two-year-old daughter and a stack of legal documents that were still being sorted through in the wake of their funerals.
The last two weeks had been the longest of my life—the last two months, really.
Too much change.
Too many plans cut short, with a few bursts of time that couldn’t be reversed.
“Ahh, here it is.” He dragged his thumb across one more page, tracing his finger along another paragraph before he looked back at the camera in his laptop. “Chris and Amie were new to our firm, and because their last lawyer retired just before their accident ...” He paused. “Usually we’re a bit more organized than this in executing the terms of someone’s will.”
My jaw clenched, and underneath the table where I sat facing my computer, my knee bounced furiously. He couldn’t see it, but based on the look on his face, he could see the tight, unsure expression I undoubtedly wore.
“Under normal circumstances, we’d do this around the time of the funeral,” he continued.
I nodded. When I trusted my voice to work steadily, I asked him the question I’d been dreading. “Who’s getting custody of the girl?”
His face softened. “Not you. She’s with Amie’s best friend right now.” After a meaningful pause, he said, “My next meeting is with the parties given guardianship of Mira.”
My shoulders relaxed. I loved Chris—one of my best friends since we’d met fifteen years earlier at the University of Michigan—but I wasn’t ready to take on any sort of parenting role to a little girl.
As I waited for the lawyer to deliver whatever news was coming next, I closed my eyes and took a slow, deep breath. Maybe in another week, the tight ball of discomfort would unspool in my chest. Maybe I’d learn how to relax into this new reality.
Forcibly retired from the game I’d spent my entire life playing, thanks to a ruptured patellar tendon, and grieving one of my best friends, thanks to a drunk driver who couldn’t stay in his own lane.
No. I’d never relax into either of those truths. All I could do now was brace myself for whatever might come next.
“Well,” he said, “Mr.Barrett, it looks like you’re the proud new owner of the Campbell House.”
My eyes snapped open. “What?”
He smiled at my brusque tone. “It’s a late-1800s property they recently purchased, someplace that meant a great deal to Chris, if I’m understanding correctly. His grandparents owned it when he was younger, and it’s been somewhat neglected the last dozen years or more.”
