Page 207 of Make the Play

“I know,” he says quietly. “We all know.”

And then my body gives out. I drop to the floor, just let gravity take me, and curl into myself like it might hold me together better than I can. My knees pull up, my hands go to my head, and I breathe low and deep.

Jake crouches beside me.

“You don’t have to fix it,” he says again. “You just have to stay steady. Be her safe place and let her come to you when she’s ready.”

I nod, barely. “I don’t want her to think I walked away.”

“Then don’t walk.”

There’s a beat of silence.

“I didn’t tell her.” My voice is a whisper now. “I didn’t tell her I love her.”

He exhales slowly. “You will. And when you do…” A small, certain smile. “She’ll believe you.”

I close my eyes, but the ache keeps building. “You ever feel like the moment you stop trying to protect someone, even for one second, everything falls apart?”

Jake’s quiet for a beat too long. He knows about the lake. We’ve never talked about it, not really, but I know he knows the story. And he understands the silence that lives in the cracks between what’s said and what’s survived.

“Yeah. I do.”

I glance at him, but he doesn’t look away.

“My therapist told me once,” Jake says, voice low, “that guilt’s a liar. It tries to tell you if you’d just done one thing differently, none of it would’ve happened. That you should’ve seen it coming. Saved them.”

I blink hard, and everything inside me turns to static as Jake holds my gaze.

“But you know what she said after that?”

I shake my head.

“She said sometimes we carry what isn’t ours, because it’s easier than accepting the truth.” His voice softens. “That we couldn’t stop it, and it happened anyway.”

The lake.

The ice.

My mistake, his cost.

I drop my head, shattered but understanding.

“I can’t make her okay.”

“No,” Jake says gently. “But you can stay close. Let her know she’s not alone. That’s all you ever wanted back then, right? Someone to stay with you in the dark?”

I nod once, broken open.

Jake places a steady hand on my shoulder. “Then be that for her.”

I close my eyes and let the truth settle. It doesn’t fix anything, but it feels like the first breath I’ve taken in hours.

***

The lake is glass. Too still, too quiet.

And then it cracks.

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