Page 104 of The Beautiful Collision
This is worse, because I’m being celebrated for someone else’s miracle.
Because I never thought to do this for Chloe.
I was always too fucking proud to ask for help, but not any longer, because the past few weeks since that night at my parents’ kitchen table have been a special kind of purgatory. You know that feeling when you finally stop lying to yourself and have to sit with who you actually are?
Yeah, that.
Every morning I wake up and remember I’m the guy who almost let his family lose everything because asking for help felt worse than drowning. I’m the guy who made a bet on a woman’s heart. I’m the guy who had to hit absolute rock bottom before admitting I wasn’t OK.
The only place I’ve been able to channel all this self-loathing is on the ice. Practice has become my religion, the rink my confessional. I’ve been skating harder than I thought my body could handle, and somehow the team has responded to my desperation with solidarity.
They stopped treating me like their entertainment and started treating me like their brother. Even Rook’s been laying off the jokes, which is how I know things are really fucked up. And we’re playing better than ever, culminating in a 6–1 victory last night, my first game back on the ice since Coach benched me.
My parents, God bless them, have been trying to help in their own way. Mom found some free counseling service through her old church friend and texted me the number with about seventeen heart emojis. Like she was trying to be casual aboutsuggesting therapy to her son who finally admitted he was in trouble.
And Dad actually drove two hours to campus the other day just to have coffee with me. We sat in Pine Barren Bagels for forty-five minutes, and I think we said maybe twenty words total, but he was there. That’s what mattered. He was there, for me, and he wasn’t asking me to help or fix anything or be the easy kid.
I could just be me.
But even as this all happens, Chloe’s condition is the sword hanging over our heads. She’s stable. Not better, not worse, just… suspended. Waiting. The experimental treatment they want to try costs more than our house is worth, which is why the fundraising thermometer near the start line is everything.
It’s the difference between hope and saying goodbye.
I look at that thermometer now—$147,000 and climbing—and my throat closes up. That’s more money than I’ve made in four years between Pizza Plus and my scholarship. That’s more than my parents have ever had in savings. More than I could have raised if I’d swallowed my pride and begged every person I knew.
But Maya did it.
Not for me, because I’m not delusional enough to think this is about me or that I’ve earned her forgiveness. But for Chloe, because she wanted to help save a kid, especially after the pediatric patient she couldn’t. This is Maya channeling her grief into action, turning her loss into Chloe’s gain.
It’s not forgiveness.
It’s not a sign that she still cares about me.
It’s just Maya being Maya—competent, fierce, and unable to stand by.
The text I sent her after discovering the website—thank you—feels pathetically inadequate now, two words in return fortransforming my family’s crisis into a community cause and for giving my sister a chance. She didn’t respond, and I didn’t push.
I’ve been trying to give her space, trying to become someone who might someday deserve to breathe the same air as her again. But it’s hard when all I want to do is fall at her feet and thank her from the bottom of my heart while I also beg her to forgive me for being the worst kind of fool.
The crowd is getting bigger, streams of people arriving with race bibs and water bottles. I recognize some faces—teammates, classmates, even professors—but most are strangers, people who heard about a sick girl and decided to show up on a Saturday morning to run three miles.
The student jazz ensemble is setting up on the professional-grade stage (where the hell did that come from?), and local news vans are parking along the field’s edge. And it’s clear to everyone that this isn’t some half-assed campus fundraiser with a folding table and a donation jar.
This is an event.
A real, legitimate, organized event with sponsors and a fucking DJ.
And in the center of it all, the eye of this charitable hurricane, is Maya.
I see her near the registration table, and my heart simultaneously stops and starts racing. She’s wearing fitted black running shorts that show off legs I’ve had wrapped around my waist, and a volunteer coordinator T-shirt that she’s French-tucked to perfection. She’s got a clipboard in one hand, a headset on, and she’s directing volunteers with terrifying efficiency.
She is magnificent.
She is beautiful.
She is also pointedly not looking at me.
I watch her handle three problems in rapid succession—a mix-up with the water stations, a sponsor banner that’s fallingdown, and a lost child who needs their parents—and she solves each one without breaking stride. This is her in her element, the social architect building something meaningful out of chaos.
