Page 27

AFTER NIKO LEAVES , I drag myself downstairs to the computer. It’s still early, and my body feels like a bag of bricks, the emotional exhaustion weighing me down just as much as the physical. The last twelve hours have flung me from the highest high down to the lowest low, and I just want the roller coaster ride to be over.

I open Wilson’s email with his offer to buy the club, and the sight of it fills me with an agonizing sense of dread. I hover the mouse over the PDF of the contract he’s attached. Selling the club is the logical answer to all my problems, but actually committing to it, truly ceding this place to someone else, someone with no care for the meaning or true beauty of the club, hurts too much.

I know, in my gut, that I want to hold on to the club. I’m not ready to give up on it.

Not yet.

I close my inbox without opening the contract. Instead I find myself wandering back up to my apartment and standing face-to-face with the wooden urn, the one that I’d been holding in my arms on the day I first met Niko.

I’d been carrying it with me everywhere I went since the moment Mom died—not in my hands but in my heart, in my mind, in every second I spent trying to keep the club alive in her honor. But stumbling along like this, anxious and upset, doesn’t seem like something that captures her spirit, her love of this place, her love of me. This isn’t what she’d want for me or for the club.

“But what about what I want?” I say out loud to the quiet apartment. Who am I doing this all for, besides her, besides the members, besides this obsession with our family’s legacy? Am I doing any of this for myself?

I’m not sure. The only thing I’ve done solely for myself lately is, well, kiss Niko.

“I need you to tell me what to do,” I beg the urn. I’ve talked to Mom before like this, driving alone in my car or muttering under my breath after a challenging lesson. At first, it had felt utterly bizarre to speak out loud to someone who wasn’t physically here anymore. But after a few times, it started to feel oddly comforting and natural. I never expected a reply, obviously. What I craved was the feeling of still being her daughter, still letting her comfort and hold me and help me figure things out.

“Come on, Mom,” I plead, but the only response I get is the whir of the air conditioner begrudgingly clicking on as the morning heat rises.

I think back to that first moment I ran into Niko at the hospital, how she’d been with me then because I’d been out trying to fulfill one of her last requests. I’d all but forgotten to do it since, so wrapped up in the last month and a half with Niko and trying to course correct the future of the club before it was too late.

It was Deb’s call that stopped me from sprinkling her ashes there on the beach, the same call that sent me speeding back down to Sunset Springs to the hospital, to Loretta, and directly into Niko. All these little things coalesced into one big, coincidental chain event, all leading to this very moment.

I don’t know how to save Sunset Springs Racquet Club any more than I did that day. But I do know what I need to do right now.

I grab the urn off the shelf and bolt downstairs, still in last night’s pajamas. The second I push through the doors to the outside, I’m reminded that it is unforgivingly hot today, with a gusting wind. It’s not a cool breeze, but rather a punishing, abrasive jolt of hot air that reminds you just how hard it is to live in the desert sometimes. But it doesn’t deter me, not today. Instead I stop right in the middle of court 8, exactly where my mother and I had sat so many times throughout my life, and tug at the lid of the container.

“I can’t think of any place that means more to us than this,” I tell her, my voice wavering as I unscrew the lid of her urn. The wind wails a reply, sending my hair every which way as I tip the container slightly forward, tapping out the tiniest bit of ash. I fully expect it to blow back in my face, but almost as soon as it puffs up into the air, the wind falters and dies, and the dust settles and slowly scatters across the fissured, weather-beaten court. The ashes come to rest in the cracks that I’ve been so desperately trying to fix, and as the wind shifts and picks up again, they spread out even farther, disappearing into every corner of our favorite place.

“I know you’ll watch over the club, even if I’m not here anymore,” I tell her. I don’t cry. My voice is now strong and steady because I know that the hardest thing to do is also the right thing. But I’m not ready to let this place go, not yet.

“I promise,” I reassure her and myself. “I’m going to try really hard to figure this out.”