Page 94 of The Longest Shot
“There's been a few changes,” I manage, the words feeling scraped from my throat. “It's all…”
“Fixed,” Jen finishes, her professional cynicism cracking as she touches the wall with something approaching religious awe. “Someone actually gave a shit.”
Mills is still gaping, her usual motormouth stalled. “Galloway would rather eat glass than spend money on us.”
"Yeah…" my voice trails off, because I'mdesperatefor them not to connect the dots, because I'm still processing the shock myself.
But Mills is onto it. Her eyes go wide, narrow, then wider. “Fitzgerald did this, didn't he?”
“After getting suspended?” Jen’s cynicism evaporates completely. “His response to public humiliation was to… channel his feelings into home improvement?”
The room goes cathedral-quiet.
“This took all night,” Sarah whispers like she’s describing organ donation. “After everything. He came here and…”
“And worked,” Mills finishes. She turns to me with an expression that rearranges my internal organs. “No audience. No credit. Just…”
She gestures at our transformed space.
“Respect,” Mills says, the word carrying atomic weight. “This is what actual fucking respect looks like.”
The word reverberates through my chest cavity, rattling things I thought were welded shut. Because she's right. What James did here wasn't some desperate play for forgiveness. It was just quiet, anonymous labor from someone whose world was actively imploding.
Respect.
I can see it. James on his knees on unforgiving concrete, scraping at tape older than most of our players. His fingers cramping, maybe bleeding, working with the precision he usually reserves for keeping pucks out of nets. All with no witnesses and no guarantee I’d ever know.
Just the work.
Because he thought we deserved better.
Because he thoughtIdeserved better.
Even after I’d treated him like something stuck to my shoe.
My body stages a rebellion against my brain. My pulse kicks into overdrive, my stomach performs gymnastics that would score a perfect ten, my hands shake as I clutch the wrapper, and there’s this hollow ache behind my sternum that feels suspiciously like longing.
Every cell in my body recognizes what my mind is desperately trying to deny—this man, this beautiful disaster of a human being who can’t shut up to save his life, chose silence… chose invisible work… chose to honor what we’d started building before we both burned it down.
The fortress I'd only recently rebuilt in a panic after that night in the library, reinforced by the gala, doesn’t crack. It vaporizes. Just… gone. Because this room, reeking of paint, is proof of everything I was catastrophically wrong about, and my traitorous heart isn't going to let me deny it anymore.
“Captain?” Mills’s voice cuts through my spiral. “You good? You look like you’re about to either cry or commit murder.”
I realize I’m standing in the middle of our transformed sanctuary, clutching a protein bar wrapper like the Shroud of Turin, while my entire worldview self-destructs. But the question sheshouldhave asked is, what the hell am I going to do about it?
Not even I know the answer to that. So, for now, I lie.
“Yeah,” I say, the word a raw rasp. “I’m good.”
thirty-five
MORGAN
I've been staringat the same paragraph for twenty-seven minutes, which means I'm either having a stroke or Mills's surveillance operation is working.
She's across from me at my kitchen table, her textbook propped open to a page she hasn't looked at once. Instead, she's conducting reconnaissance with the subtlety of a SWAT team at a yoga retreat. Every time I shift, her eyes track the movement. When my fingers drum against the table, she catalogs it.
Because she's not here to study.
