Page 11

I stare at the doorway she disappeared through, and then I turn toward my father. I raise my hands up in the air as if I’m totally lost as to what to do here.

“I’d give her a minute,” he says. “Run home if you want to take a shower. I can work here.”

I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. My gut tells me I should talk to her, so against my father’s advice, I head upstairs.

She’s sitting on the fluffy pink rug, her arms linked around her knees when I walk into her room.

I silently walk into the room and sit beside her, using the side of the bed as a backrest. “I know it’s scary, Harper, but I’m not going to let you go through this alone. We’re a team now, okay? And I know a lot about teams.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to lose your mom and dad and be ripped away from everything,” she counters.

I let out a grunt. “You don’t think so?”

She peers over at me, and the anger seems to give way to a bit of curiosity.

I stare down at the pink rug. “My parents sent me away to boarding school when I was twelve. I was only two years older than you are now. Maybe I didn’t lose them the way you lost yours, but I can assure you, I felt lonely and scared. I was devastated.”

She’s quiet, and I take the opportunity to show her other ways I can relate.

“I was lost and alone in seventh and eighth grade. But then I went to high school. I found the football team. A coach took a special interest in me—the offensive coordinator. He built my confidence. He showed me something I could excel in. The school was known for football, but my parents didn’t care about anything like that. They sent me there since it was the closest high school that had room and board as part of the tuition.”

I roll up my sleeve, and her eyes widen. I realize it’s the first time she’s seen my arm apart from on TV when her parents used to watch me play.

I point to a tattoo with a bear next to a date and a single word in script above it: hustle . “This one is a memorial to Coach Barrett. He’d always say that to us. Hustle .”

Hustle didn’t just mean to be quick or aggressive on the field. He also meant off the field. Hustle in every aspect of life. Work hard every day. Be smart. Be aggressive. Be urgent. Be present. These were all things he said to his players all the time, but they were all summed up in that single word. Hustle.

“He meant a lot to you,” she muses.

I nod. “He was like a father to me when it felt like I didn’t have one.”

“What happened to him?”

“Cancer.” I choke on the word a little, the emotion getting to me like it always does when I talk about him. The disease took him down fast. One minute he was telling me to do my job, and the next, he was gone. It was my senior year of high school. We were in the middle of the playoffs when he got his diagnosis, and he was already gone by the time we took home the state championship.

He wasn’t there to see us win.

Neither were my own parents, but I didn’t give a fuck about them.

Coach Barrett left an impact on my life, and I needed his word to remind me every day that I needed to work hard, that I needed to be smart and aggressive and urgent and present in everything I did.

And that single word pushed me all the way into the NFL.

I don’t say all of that to Harper. Instead, I say, “I don’t want you to feel like you’re alone or like nobody understands what you’re going through.”

“But I am alone,” she says pointedly. “It’s sad you lost someone you loved, but that doesn’t bring both my parents back.”

“No, it doesn’t. But whatever happens, you’ve got me.” I shrug. “It’s probably not good enough, but I’m going to try really damn hard anyway.”

She twists her lips. “You said a bad word.”

“I know. Get used to it. I say a lot of them.”

She lets out a soft chuckle. “What’s your house like?”

“To be honest, it’s a bachelor pad, so I’m gonna have to clean it up for you.”

“What’s that mean?”

It means there’s probably a stack of porn laying out somewhere that I don’t think twice about. It means I stuck to the essentials, so there’s no fluffy pink rugs, no stuffed animals, no crayons or art supplies a ten-year-old might take an interest in.

But I also have a cleaning lady named Elsa who swings by once a week to class up the joint, so it’s not like there’s little beard hairs in the bathroom or dishes in the kitchen sink.

There’s electronics and gaming systems. There’s the most comfortable bed in the world with Egyptian cotton sheets because someone told me to buy them, and those sheets are usually slightly rumpled if the bed is made at all, which usually only happens when Elsa stops by.

The fridge is stocked with lean proteins and vegetables, and the pantry is stocked pretty much exclusively with peanut butter or items that contain peanut butter such as Nutter Butters and Reese’s cereal.

I wonder if she likes peanut butter.

“It means there’s not a whole lot that a ten-year-old girl might like there, so today we’re going to pack up whatever you want to bring with.”

“Oh,” she mumbles.

“It’s okay if you don’t want that,” I say carefully as I try to gauge her reaction.

She lifts a shoulder. “I want this to be my room here. If I have to go somewhere else, I want a different room. You know?”

“I can understand that. And if you want a fluffy rug like this,” I say, patting the rug I’m sitting on, “then we’ll figure out where to order one.”

“I think you want one more than I do,” she teases me, and something about a sassy ten-year-old putting me in my place warms my chest.

“I’m man enough not to deny that.”

She lets out a tiny laugh. “Okay, fine. You can order me a rug.”

I twist my lips. “I may check to see what other colors they come in. Any idea where it came from?”

She shakes her head, so I flip over the rug and look for a tag. I carefully type the information from the tag into my phone, and a bunch of stores that carry the rug pop up. I click and discover the rug is both on sale and it comes in a variety of colors.

“This light pink or the neon pink?” I ask.

“Neon.”

I add both to my cart, and then I add a navy blue one to my cart, too, because it’s my favorite color, and a black and red one since they’re Aces colors.

“Are you really ordering five rugs?” she asks me.

“You got a problem with that?” I shoot back.

“No,” she says. “And if you click the hot pink rug, it might show you other things people have bought that go with the rug.”

She’s not wrong. We find an entire bedding set, some lamps, and the shit you put over your windows to go with it. I don’t bother watching the total add up. If this is what she wants, this is what she gets.

“My guest room will become your bedroom, and it has a queen bed. Is that too big?”

She shakes her head, and I add all the bedding to my cart.

Come to think of it, the guest room isn’t as bright as this room. It’s navy blue with dark wood furniture, but she deserves a pink rainbow wall like she’s got here. Or at least white furniture.

“What’s this called? Pink rainbow colors?” I ask, pointing to the wall.

She giggles. “It’s called pink ombre.”

“Ombre?” I repeat.

She nods, and an idea forms in my mind for what I want her walls to look like in her new room.

“Do you want white furniture or black?” I ask.

“White,” she says.

“You got it.” I decide to text my buddy Tristan. He just had a kid, a girl, and I’m sure he has some connections to people who can figure out how to decorate a room for a kid.

“You got some time to talk later?” I say into my phone.

“You voice your text messages?” she asks as she watches the words type out into the text message.

I shrug. Rather than admitting I have terrible spelling skills, I brush it off like it’s no big deal. “It’s faster to talk it out.”

She nods. “I can respect that.”

I laugh at her turn of phrase, and a text comes right back from Tristan. I hit a button to have my phone read me the text.

“What’s up motha-fucka? Yeah, I’m around. Call me whenever.”

“Your friend said a bad word, too,” Harper tells me with a bit of reprimanding in her tone.

I throw a hand dramatically to my chest. “I heard that! I’m as shocked as you are!”

“No, you’re not,” she says with an eyeroll.

“No, I’m not. Get used to it. So do you want to pack any clothes or anything?” I ask.

“I have a suitcase on the top shelf of my closet if you want to get it down. I want to bring my favorite clothes, some stuffies, my coloring books…” She trails off. “Is that okay?”

“You can bring whatever you want, kid,” I say gently. “And if it doesn’t fit in your suitcase, we’ll put it in mine. And if it doesn’t fit in there, we’ll get another suitcase. I can send a truck over to pick up anything else you need. Okay?”

She nods. “When are we leaving?”

“Whenever you’re ready. My father seems to think you should start school sooner rather than later, so we should head out in the next few days. And Harper?”

She turns to look at me, and the sadness in her eyes fucking kills me.

“We can come back here to visit any time you want.”

She sniffles a little and nods. “Thanks, Travis. Do I call you Travis?”

“You call me whatever you want to. Dude, buddy, Trav. You don’t know me very well yet, but as long as it’s not the same nickname my friend Tristan just called me, we’re fine.” I stand and head over to her closet to pull down her suitcase.

She giggles. “So you can say it but I’m not allowed to?”

“That’s right, pipsqueak.”

She rolls her eyes at me with a whole bunch of sass, and as hard and strange and fast as this is, I feel like we’re going to figure out a way to make it work.