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“Leave now, and I’ll come home.”
He panned his gaze around the room. He belonged here on this team, and he would be on this team even after it was no more and they left it all behind to be husbands, fathers, and perhaps even legitimate businessmen.
“Syd...I can’t.”
“I know,” she said, the defeat in her voice more transparent than glass. “Look, I have to go, but be careful, okay? Please be careful. And I fully admit that how I did this wasn’t exactly mature, so I’d like for us to still talk when you get in. Call me. I’ll come to the house.”
It wasn’t that she’d come “home.” It wasn’t that she’d invite him to her place and risk him finding out where she lived—as if he couldn’t find out on his own.
To her, it was now “the house.”
His house.
An oversized bachelor pad.
Back when he was in the military, and Sydney was in her sophomore year of college, they broke up to “explore other relationships.” Then, after finishing his service commitment, he returned to D.C. to work on the degree that would help carry him into federal law enforcement.
On his first day of classes and the first day of her last semester, they ran into each other. That night, they did more than “run” into each other. One thing led to another, then another, and roughly three months later, she was pregnant.
Unfortunately, they lost the baby.
Not long after, he proposed, and she accepted despite her father’s reservations about whether he would make a good husband. Then she graduated, and she and her father decided to expand their Donovan Foundation, which focused on creating career avenues for underserved youth boxers, to New York and California.
Expansion meant her being out of the DMV area for nearly two full years, collectively. So, he told himself that he had school to focus on and that their relationship could survive the distance.
Instead, their relationship struggled.
They talked on the phone, video conferenced, and saw each other when she was in town, which had been as short as twenty-four hours and no longer than a week or two at a time.
Still, they made it, and they got married on a blistering Saturday afternoon after the air conditioning went out in the AME church her family had attended for decades. Things improved at their reception, which was held less than a ten-minute drive from the White House at the Waldorf Astoria on Pennsylvania Avenue.
His sister, Audrey, had told him, multiple times, that he and Sydney struggled because they were trying to hold on to versions of themselves that no longer existed. They fell in love as teenagers, but their love didn’t grow with them. Now, they were different people searching for the person they fell for all those years ago, but they refused to accept the truth; that piece of their soul grew smaller with each passing season.
“Yeah, I’ll call you when we wrap things up here,” he conceded. “It might be a few days, but I’ll definitely call. And I’ll be careful.”
“Thank you.”
“I love you, Syd.”
“I love you too, Joel.”
She hung up.
He lowered the phone and stared at the screen. Every version of his future had Sydney in it. If he didn’t love Sydney Donovan, he couldn’t envision himself loving anyone else.
Gage headed his way, and he plastered on as neutral of an expression as possible; the man could read white letters on white paper in the middle of a blizzard.
“You should be resting, Lattimore.”
He cleared any lingering emotion from his throat. “I know. Just checking in with Syd.”
“Everything okay?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“Later.”
