It’s a physical ache that’s put a pallor over the whole world.
The lights on Beck’s Christmas tree are dull and lifeless. The cinnamon rolls heating in the oven smell like sawdust. James’s shrieks are giving me a headache, and Emma’s whining is making me want to pull my hair out.
And this house is too crowded.
I came here to get away.
This isn’t away.
But then, I can’t get away from myself, can I?
“You could just call her,” Levi says two days before Christmas when he catches me staring at my phone without doing anything about it.
“I don’t deserve her,” I reply.
And that’s the crux of the issue.
I didn’t just leave her.
I left her when she was down. Sick. Not at full strength.
And I left her.
I left her to fix herself.
Me. The guy who’s always taken care of everyone else. I couldn’t take care of her, because I couldn’t take care of myself. And the truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find my own oxygen mask when it comes to the people in my life being sick.
“You deserve to be happy,” my mom tells me.
She has to say that. She’s my mom.
I head out for a hike in the woods by myself, because no one’s going to try to placate me out in nature.
Not that anyone’s letting me go anywhere by myself. This time, Davis tags along.
He doesn’t talk.
The Man Bun knows when to shut up. Except when we get back to the house, and I hear my kids laughing hysterically inside, and I see Sarah giving Emma raspberries on her belly while Beck makes James fly, I get this ache in the pit of my gut.
That’s family. And I can’t give that to both of them by myself at my house.
“Ask you something?” Davis says.
“No.”
“Why her?”
I scowl at him. “I said no.”
“You want to walk away, walk away. You do fine on your own, man. If you don’t need her, you still want her, and the question is, why? Because that’s what you need to know to decide if it’s worth it to go back and grovel, or if it’s better that you go through this and come out alone on the other side.”
He leaves me wondering—again—how the youngest of all of us got to be the smartest.
Why Lila?
Because she’s the only person I know more afraid of getting close than I am. Because she took the risk anyway. Because she sent chicken noodle soup when my kids were sick. Because she gets this light in her eyes when she talks about romance novels, and I know she’s not talking about the books, but talking about how she feels when she falls in love.
Because she challenges me.
She makes me move outside of myself.
I’ve been all over the damn world. I thought my eyes were open to just about anything. But they’ve never been open to a woman who’s overcome losing everything, only to turn around and take over the whole fucking world.
She’s not humble, and she shouldn’t be. She should be fucking proud of everything she’s done.
But she’s not hoarding her wealth either. She’s using it to fix a team she shouldn’t feel responsible for, but does anyway.
I caught her filing her mail that had been forwarded from New York just after Thanksgiving. Letter after letter thanking Dalton Wellington for his generous contributions to charities for orphans. To children’s hospitals. To boarding schools. To scholarship funds. To literacy. To pet shelters. To women’s shelters.
It was a fucking box. And she got flustered when I started looking closer, and insisted she still wasn’t doing enough, and that she didn’t want to talk about it.
She might say she’s hiding from the world, but she’s making a difference, quietly, in her own way.
She’s the only person I know more responsible than me.
And despite all the secrets we started with, I trust her every bit as much as I trust every single person I’ve ever consciously chosen to call family.
Fuck, I miss her. I want to call her and ask what I should do about running away from the only woman in the world who’s managed to make me want to risk my heart again, except I doubt she has any desire to see me ever again.
For all I know, she’s hopped a plane to an obscure island somewhere, and I’ll never see her again.
The thought makes my heart crumble to dust, and I have to suck in a hard breath to keep myself from completely losing my mind.
Mom sits down next to me at the dining room table and squeezes my hands, and I realize I’ve completely tuned out of everything going on around me.
Again.
Beck flies James to the door, cracks it open, takes something from one of his security guys, and calls my name.
“Daddy got mail!” James says.
I grimace when Beck hands me the envelope with the official Fireballs logo. At least, the logo for now.
It’s probably my severance package.
I don’t care about the team. I can’t, because no feeling that I have about the team will ever touch the dull, constant ache that I feel when I think about being unable to be the man Lila needed.
I toss the letter aside.
Mom makes a disgusted noise, grabs it, and rips it open.
“Hey!”
“Tripp Robert Wilson, stop hiding and deal with it.” A letter and an old-fashioned receipt tumble out of the envelope. She grabs both and shakes them at me. “The only thing permanent in life is death. She’s not dead. You miss her. If she deserves you, she’s going to understand. Get over yourself and do something about this.”
Leave it to my mother to put the onus of deserving on Lila’s shoulders when Lila didn’t do anything wrong.
Mom gives me the eyebrow of I am your mother and I know what’s best for you while she offers me the two slips of paper. And when I don’t take them quickly enough, she heaves an exasperated sigh worthy of an Oscar—swear to god, Jessie said so once upon a time—and thinking of Jessie makes me realize just how disappointed she’d be in me too.
Levi was right.
She’d want me to live.
She’d grab me by the shoulders, tell me one bad flu bug doesn’t mean germs are going to kill everyone you love. It sucks. It sucks so hard that I died. But that’s no excuse for you hiding from the rest of your damn life, and then she’d order me to move on, fucking relax, find my happiness, and live.
And this? This isn’t living. This is hiding.
Mom gasps, and I jerk my head around, looking to see if she could hear that same voice I just did.
But of course she didn’t. That message?
That was for me.
Mom’s staring at the papers from Fireballs headquarters.
“What? What?” I snatch it, my stomach dropping at just how round her eyes have gone, and I quickly scan the note, then the receipt, then repeat.
Three or four times.
On the fifth read, it finally sinks in that I’m starting at a receipt for the sale of the Fireballs organization, to me, for one dollar. Paid in cash.
The note is brief. And handwritten.
Mr. Wilson,
I know you’ll take good care of them. Mr. Pakorski approves.
All my love,
Lila
Why Lila?
Because she does insane shit like this.
She just gave me a fucking baseball team.