Page 155 of Let the Game Begin

“And do you think hope is enough to save him?”

“Yes and you should do everything you can to find it inside you.” I put an instinctive hand on his knee, an unconscious gesture that I regretted the moment I did it. I was prepared to apologize and put the appropriate distance between us, but then, Neil did something that left me speechless.

He squeezed my hand with his own and pulled me closer to him. He didn’t look at me, and his other elbow was still propped up on his leg, but he kept my forearm pressed to his thigh as his fingers toyed with mine.

I held my breath because even just the touch of his hand was all-consuming for me.

“You really are a strange girl, Tinkerbell,” he murmured as he looked at my hand, which seemed so small compared to his.

I smiled. “And you’re a little bit of a disaster,” I answered with a hint of irony.

“A lot, I’d say,” he corrected, chewing on his lip.

Perhaps Neil was finally letting me touch his soul…

***

We spent the whole night in the hospital, waiting for news about Logan.

Several times, Mia told me to go home and get some rest, but there was no way I was going to leave my family there alone, especially not Neil. I fell asleep in an awkward position on one of the chairs in the waiting room and woke up a few hours later with a powerful headache that made me grumble with pain.

“Selene.” A hand rested on my shoulder, and I blinked to focus on the figure looming above me. I could see dark stubble below a pair of hazel eyes.

“Matt,” I whispered, my voice still thick with sleep.

“I thought I’d bring you something hot. You haven’t eaten.” He handed me a cup of hot chocolate, and I reached up to take it.

It was a weird feeling: this was probably the most intimate moment the two of us had shared in years. I occurred to me then that Matt sometimes seemed different from the man I remembered and that thought led me to wonder if it might actually be possible for things to improve between the two of us.

“Thanks,” I said awkwardly, my hands tightening around the warm cup. I blew on it before taking a sip of the chocolate.

“I wanted to thank you.” He sat down next to me and smiled.

“For what?” I asked, feeling the hot chocolate trickle down into my empty stomach.

“Being there for Mia and the kids.”

“No need to thank me. We have to support each other at times like this.” I was convinced of this: we were a family, albeit in our own weird way.

“You remind me so much of your mother,” he said softly, and a melancholy look passed over his weary face. All it took was one mention of my mother, and I was suddenly reminded of my adolescence in a kind of flashback that conjured up all the pain I’d felt in those years. I lowered my gaze to the steaming cup avoiding my father’s eyes.

“Selene.” He paused. “I know very well that I’ve made a lot of mistakes. That I’ve always put my career first and that I was…” His voice broke because it was never easy to expose oneself in that way. “Unfaithful to your mother. I know you saw me with another woman. Everyone makes mistakes. The most important thing is that we understand our mistakes and try to fix them.” He rubbed his palms against his stylish pants, the same ones he’d worn the day before. None of us had gone back home—none of us would until we knew more about Logan’s condition.

“I wanted you from the moment your mother told me she was pregnant. Please, try to forgive me. You can’t know how much it hurts that you won’t call me ‘Dad.’”

It hurt me too, and maybe I should have been less extreme and more willing to bend. Matt’s behavior had hurt me in a soul-destroying way that irreparably poisoned my perception of him. The struggle to forgive him was basically synonymous with the intense pain that I still felt inside.

“I don’t know.” My frosty tone extinguished his hopes as well as myown. “I don’t know, Matt,” I repeated thoughtfully, staring at the cup as though I might find all of life’s answers at the bottom of it. Forgiveness meant forgetting about our painful past, and I wasn’t ready to do that. I was a slave to my anger and resentment and maybe that pain was always going to be inside me, even if I did try to stuff it down into a corner of my soul.

“Think about it. That’s all I ask of you.” I had never heard my father plead like that. He had always been a man who never asked for anything, the invincible and untouchable Matt Anderson.

He swiped a hand over his face, and only then did I notice the dark circles under his eyes. He was really having a rough time, and surprisingly, I was worried about him.

“You should go home and rest,” I suggested.

“No, not until we have more definitive news about Logan,” he answered, sounding exhausted as he gazed at Mia, sleeping next to Chloe. Suddenly, it occurred to me that Neil was nowhere to be seen, and I immediately started looking around for him.

“Where’s Neil?” I asked, maybe sounding slightly too concerned. I heard it as I said it and hoped Matt wouldn’t get suspicious.