1
TYLER
11 MONTHS LATER
The house is too quiet.
I've been telling myself that's fine. Quiet is fine. Quiet means nobody's disappointed in you, nobody's watching you fail, nobody's waiting for you to do the thing you always end up doing. I've had a lot of practice being alone in the last year, and I'm getting better at it—almost comfortable, even.
It's eight in the morning, and I'm forty push-ups into a workout I don't particularly want to do, palms flat against the hardwood floor of my rental's living room. Sweat drips down my temples. The ceiling fan clicks overhead, once every few rotations, the same way it did yesterday and the day before. I still haven’t fixed it.
Off-season mornings are like this. The empty hours have to be filled with something, so I fill them with workouts, meal prep, and the discipline of not thinking too hard about anything. Training camp doesn't start for another three weeks. Three more weeks of this specific kind of stillness, just me, the quiet, the ceiling fan, and the two spare bedrooms full of unopened boxes I haven't touched since I moved in. It's not that I don't know what's in them. It's that unpacking feels like deciding to stay, and Ihaven't figured out yet if that's something I'm doing or just something that's happening to me.
I don't know what I was thinking, renting a three-bedroom. I think some version of me believed that having the space would eventually make me want to fill it. That version of me was wrong about a lot of things.
Fifty push-ups.My arms shake on the last five. I collapse onto my back, chest heaving, and stare up at the fan.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
It’s been a year in Ridgeport, and this place still doesn't feel like anything, which I've decided is probably the best I can hope for. Not good, not bad. Just walls, a roof, and a mortgage's worth of rent every month. I stopped waiting for it to feel like home somewhere around March.
I reach for my water bottle, but my fingers find empty air.
The doorbell rings.
I lift my head off the floor. It's probably the resistance bands I ordered last week. I've been getting lots of packages lately, mostly things I don't need, because ordering things online is something to do in the evenings when the quiet gets loud enough to notice. Signing a pro contract means you can fill a house with things you don't need and barely notice the dent. I roll to my feet, grab the towel off the couch, scrub it across my face, and yank a t-shirt on as I head for the door.
The bell rings again.
"Coming," I call out.
I swing the door open, already looking down, expecting cardboard.
Instead, there's a baby carrier on my doorstep.
I go very still.
It's an infant car seat, with a curved handle, a fabric canopy pulled halfway down, and a soft pink blanket tucked inside. Inside the blanket is a baby. She's screaming, full-throated and furious, the kind of sound that cuts right through whatevercareful numbness you've been cultivating for the past eleven months.
"What the fuck?" I breathe.
I look up and down the street. There’s no car pulling away. No frantic parent doubling back up the path. Just my quiet neighborhood in the morning sun, indifferent to the screaming infant on my welcome mat, as if this were normal, as if people's lives just detonate on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday in August all the time.
My hands are shaking when I crouch down. There's an envelope taped to the side of the carrier, my name written across the front in handwriting I don't recognize.
Tyler.
My stomach drops through the floor.
I rip it open, and there’s a single sheet of paper inside, folded once.
Tyler, her name is Harper. She's yours. I can't do this. I'm sorry. – Jessica
The world doesn't tilt. It just stops.
There's a second piece of paper underneath the note, thicker, official-looking. A birth certificate, with the state seal in the corner.
Harper Rose West. Born June 1st.