Page 78 of Breakaway Daddies

Heavy and absolute.

Then Thomas takes a step forward, his voice low and rough. “I was your friend before she ever showed up.”

“I know.”

“So what? She’s gone, and now we don’t matter anymore?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“It sounds like what you’re saying.”

I drag my hands over my face, palms scraping against the stubble on my jaw. My skin burns from it, but I press harder.

“It’s not that you don’t matter,” I say, voice cracking. “It’s just… everything feels different now.We’redifferent. And I don’t know how to be around you guys without feeling like a piece of me is missing. Like she’s missing.”

That lands like a body check to the gut.

Thomas flinches. Actually flinches. And then looks at me like I’ve gutted him.

“You think it doesn’t feel like that for me?” he whispers.

I don’t answer.

I can’t.

He curses under his breath, low and vicious, then grabs his duffel and turns his back on me like it’s the only way to keep from breaking something… or someone.

And the silence that follows is somehow worse than the shouting ever was.

I pull my hoodie on and shove open the side door of the arena, the heavy metal groaning in protest. The cold outside hits me square in the face, a slap, sharp and deserved. The kind of sting you don’t shake off because you know you earned it.

The concrete benches by the loading dock are slick with melted frost. I don’t care. I sit anyway, elbows braced on my knees, head down like I’m waiting for a fight that’s already happened and left me too sore to swing again.

My phone’s heavy in my hand. Like it knows what I’m about to do and wants no part of it.

Still, I unlock it, thumb automatically on the screen.

Scroll.

Ally and Kenzie, smiling wide at some rooftop dinner, champagne glasses tilted, sun setting behind them in this warm golden haze. Perfect. Untouchable.

Next, an old photo of the team, from two seasons back. We’re all crammed together in the locker room, grinning with stupid tape mustaches and black eyes, Rowan flipping the camera off, Thomas doing his dumb pouty duck face, me in the middle with my arm slung over Jinx’s shoulders.

I didn’t realize it then. How permanent she’d feel. How easily she’d slide into our world and rewire it.

And then, there she is.

Jinx.

The photo isn’t from us, probably taken by a patient’s parent or a coworker. She’s in her scrubs, crouched beside a little boy in a wheelchair, her face lit up with laughter like she’s got the sun trapped behind her eyes. The kid’s beaming like she handed him the whole damn universe, and maybe she did. That’s how she is. That’s what shedoes.

My thumb hovers over the heart. Over the place where I could press and say… what? That I see her? That I miss her? That every second without her is this dull, gnawing ache I can’t bandage?

I don’t tap it.

I can’t.

I just stare.

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