"Molly."
"Molly can sleep in the main guest room."
That had me rubbing my forehead. The king bed in that room was the one I always slept on. She'd look tiny in the middle of that bed by herself. Under the sheets and underneath the down plaid comforter that I loved because it was soft and light but kept me warm even on the coldest South Dakota winter night. "Right."
Even to my own ears, my voice sounded rough.
A text notification dinged in my ear, and I pulled the phone away. Inexplicably, my heart sped up when I saw it was from Molly.
Molly Ward: This was just emailed to me. Just FYI.
I clicked on the link and found myself scrolling through the pictures too fast because I loved what I was seeing. My thumb hovered over the map, and I zoomed in. It was on the east side of Lake Washington, the same place that the Wolves owner, Allie Sutton-Pierson, lived with her husband, retired QB Luke Pierson.
"Grandma, I have something that just came through my phone that I need to look at. I'll email you my itinerary, okay?"
"Sure, sure. You'll fly on one of those fancy private planes?"
I smiled. "Probably. You know I need the extra legroom."
She harrumphed. "Whatever you say, half-pint."
"I'm excited to see you too, Grandma."
"Oh, hush. You know I love you best."
I rolled my eyes. I was her only grandchild "Love you too."
After I tossed the phone down, Marty shifted from the corner, and I bit back a curse, sending him a glare instead.
His smile widened behind the camera, but he didn't say anything.
"I actually forgot you were here, you creep." That made him laugh. "Am I going to get in trouble if I talk to you?"
"Nah. We can edit around anything, you know that."
I sat up on the couch and grabbed my phone again. The house that Molly sent me was ... perfect. Absolutely perfect.
A little bit more money than what I wanted to spend, but it checked every other box. Tall ceilings, warm tones, a massive kitchen, and sprawling views of the lake and the mountains, greens at every height in the trees that surrounded it. Trees meant privacy, and I liked that too. It was set back from the road, but the house itself wasn't a behemoth. Four bedrooms and three baths with a fully finished basement and a home gym already installed. A pool for laps in the morning before practice.
It was a space I could actually live in, not just exist.
Me: Marty is here already. Want to come with us if I can get a hold of the listing agent?
The fact that I held my breath as she started typing was akin to a blaring airhorn in my ear.
Danger! Danger! Abort!
Molly Ward: I can't tonight. The twins are here hanging out. Just wanted to pass the house along, it looked like you.
She started typing and stopped. Then once again. No other text popped up, and before I realized what I was doing, my jaw popped from grinding my molars together.
"Molly meeting us?" Marty asked lightly. Too lightly.
I cut him a look, then pulled up the number for the listing agent. Something about all of this, the past few days, had me feeling edgy and restless. There were too many circumstances out of my control, and it had my skin humming in relentless buzzing.
It would have been convenient to blame that for how the next two hours of my life unfolded.
The listing agent for the house filled my silence as I walked around all four thousand square feet of the home. Each stretch of wood floor, each reflection of the lights in the granite lining the massive kitchen island, every corner of the large, light-filled bedrooms fell prey to my notice, even if I didn't say much about it.
She must have had a sixth sense for the way I studied each inch of the place.
It did look like me.
It felt like me too. And Molly had known it.
If her inbox was anything like mine, I'd had a dozen houses emailed to me, most of which had only earned a cursory glance because I was too damn tired most nights to try to go see.
The space was large enough for someone my size, the furniture in the home big and comfortable with hefty wood frames and room to spread out. Sprawling views of blues and greens and glinting water. In my bones, I knew it was meant to be my home.
It was one of those times when I never questioned how quickly I came to a decision. It was a trait that served me well on the field, acting on instinct, because I knew my instinct wouldn’t steer me wrong.
This place was mine.
If Marty was annoyed by my lack of commentary, he didn't prompt me to say something that would serve the damn narrative. He simply followed me around as we both ignored the mindless chatter of the woman who was about to make a huge-ass commission off me.
"It's been on the market for a little over a month," she said, trailing red-tipped fingernails along the custom trim on the windows overlooking the lushly landscaped backyard. "I know I'm not supposed to say things like this, but I'm sure my clients would be"—her eyes trailed deliberately over my chest and arms—"flexible."
I held her gaze and saw exactly what she'd be willing to give me.
Nothing about her tempted me. Not her long legs or curvy hips, the nipped in waist and generous bust, or the curly dark hair spilling down her back. Most guys on the team didn't believe me, but it's entirely possible to flip the off switch when it comes to the desire to sleep with a stranger.
She was beautiful. Incredibly beautiful.
And the last thing I wanted was to see the look in her eyes at how much she'd let me do to her. It was every cliché that I hated about being a professional athlete. Because I did what I did, I was desirable. Because I wore a recognizable jersey and had a familiar face, she'd let me flip her flat on her back with no more than a nod of agreement on my part.
Nothing about that appealed to me, and so, no part of my body reacted.
Instead, all I wished was that she was someone else. Someone shorter with lighter hair and brighter eyes and a bigger smile. Someone who found my temper mildly amusing and schooled me on football. Someone who looked at me and wanted to dig beneath the surface, not worship the façade.
"Could I have some privacy to make my decision?" I asked her.
She glanced at the camera and back at me in question, like she couldn’t tell whether I wanted her or Marty to leave the room.
"I'd like to be alone," I said more firmly. Her eyes shuttered in an instant, and she gave me a nod of deference.
"Of course," she purred.
Marty stayed by me, a strangely comforting presence as I braced my arms on the ledge and stared ahead.
"You find a house, Griffin?"
All that restlessness from early uncoiled slowly, sinking into something comfortable. "I think I did, Marty."
He gestured on the ground, just behind the couch. I didn't see what it was at first until I crouched down and pulled it out by the edge. A smile lifted my lips when I saw them stacked on top of each other.
I called the agent back in the room.
"I want it."
Her eyes flared with a different kind of excitement. "Excellent. I'd be happy to present an offer to my clients."
"I'll offer their asking price, but I want a two-week close date so I can move in before the season starts." And I lifted my hand, letting her know I wasn’t done. "I also want to film a segment here tonight if they’d be so kind as to not return home just yet."
She lifted her eyebrows. “They’re out of town, so that should be fine.”
“And I want to borrow these.” I lifted the other hand.
If I thought her eyebrows were high before, they shot up even farther.
"You ..." She shook her head. "That's what you want?"
"Do we have a deal?"
"I-I'll call them right now," she said cautiously. In her eyes, I must have lost a bit of my appeal and replaced it with a healthy dose of insanity.
Marty chuckled. "You're serious, man?"
I looked at my hands. "As a h
eart attack. She won't say no to this."
Chapter Fifteen
Molly
"Do you think Paige would think it's weird if I write a paper on the maternal impact she had on older children who have no biological tie to her?"
My hand froze, the bottle of wine suspended mid pour over my glass. "Umm, no?"
Claire typed furiously on her laptop before slapping it shut. "I can't figure out what to do with this paper, and I have to get started."
Isabel came down the hallway of our apartment and glared at Claire’s computer like it kicked her in the crotch. "Do you have to type so loudly? You sound like a chicken pounding a mallet on that thing."
Claire flipped her off.
From my perch on the couch, I smiled at both of them as I took another sip of my wine. It was drier than I usually liked, so I grimaced as I swallowed. Lia and Claire were huddled together on the other end.
Their faces were mirror images of each other, but our family could tell them apart with no problems. It was in the angle of Lia's jaw and the slope of Claire's nose. Not to mention, the second they opened their mouth, it would be a dead giveaway to anyone who actually knew them.
Our mom—or as Isabel affectionately referred to her, that selfish bitch who birthed us—might not have won any parenting awards, but she passed down a helluva gene pool because all four of us bore a striking resemblance to her. I could see her easily in the dark, thick hair, high cheekbones, and shape of our blue, blue eyes.
Isabel's smile was more like our dad's, more like Logan's, and she had the same lanky, athletic build that Emmett promised to have as he grew up. My curves had lessened into adulthood, but the twins still maintained a curvier figure as they tiptoed quietly into their twenties.
"Why wouldn't you write your paper about Paige?" Lia asked, handing Claire a half-finished glass of wine. Claire took it without a word and finished for her. "She basically was our mom."
In the kitchen just around the corner, Isabel slammed the cupboard door shut. "There's no basically about it," she called.
I smiled at Claire. "Which class is this for?"
She was graduating from college with a major in developmental psychology and a minor in sociology with plans to start her master's in the spring after a winter graduation. Dropping her head back on the couch, she sighed. "Sociology of families. I should have taken it earlier, but"—she shrugged—"I was kind of dreading this part of it."
Lia took the empty wine glass from Claire and set it on the end table. "Our family isn't that dysfunctional."
"No, but trying to discuss the structure of it is a bit confusing." She started ticking off fingers. "We had married heterosexual parents with an unconventional age difference. One died, followed a few years later by one voluntarily abandoning us to an unmarried heterosexual male relative. A couple of years after that, he married a single heterosexual female for legal purposes. Neither adopted us, and Paige never had guardianship rights installed, so technically, she's just a cool sister-in-law who helped when she didn't have to." Claire shook her head when Iz slammed something else around in the kitchen. "For all intents and purposes, she was the main maternal figure in our life, but our mother is still around. Just not ... around us."
"Isn't she in fucking Bali or something?" Isabel muttered from the kitchen. “That’s what her last bullshit email said, what? A year ago?”
"India, I think," I corrected. "She lives at that center. The weird guru guy who wrote all those books on mindfulness and blah, blah, whatever."
The wine had me feeling pleasantly fuzzy, not drunk, not even really buzzed, but just happy enough that I didn't even care that we were talking about Brooke—that selfish bitch who birthed us. Even she was a pleasant distraction from the fact that Noah had invited me to come look at the house. Saying no had been hard. Really, really hard. Like Noah's biceps hard. Noah's rock-hard ass hard.
Not that I knew what his ass felt like, but I could imagine. I'd watched him lift weights all week. Do squats. Bend over on the field when he lined up against the offense. I'd touched a few things on Noah's body back in the day, but his ass had not been one of them.
What a freaking tragedy, I thought through my wine haze.
Isabel stormed into the family room, a bottle of tequila in her hand that had me blinking owlishly at her. Were we at tequila level? I missed it. "Paige deserves to have a paper written about her."
"She does," Claire said diplomatically.
The tequila bottle waved like a flag. "She stepped in when no one could handle you two little hellions."
Lia rolled her eyes. "Like you were a walk in the park, Miss Angry Girl."
"That's the point of this class, though," Claire interjected when Iz opened her mouth with what promised to be a scathing retort. "The structure of the family, as we know it, has changed dramatically. Even the phrase family structure itself holds different weight than it did twenty years ago. The rise in single parent families, homosexual parents, even saying things like nontraditional implies a bias that we need to be careful of. Our family history didn't meet any sort of definition of 'traditional,' even when our parents were married. Dad was so much older than her, but they still fit the definition of a traditional family structure as it’s been historically defined. It implies there's something wrong or nontraditional about Paige and Logan raising us when they filled the parental roles to much better success."
We all stared at her for a beat.
I poured more wine.
Iz unscrewed the top of the tequila and disappeared into the kitchen.
Lia spoke first even though she'd probably be able to stare at Claire and communicate what she was thinking. "So why are you questioning what to do your paper on?"
Claire licked her lips, and her gaze darted to the kitchen. "Because I'm wondering if it's too easy to write about Paige. I could argue that Mom, and her absence in our life, had a greater impact on us. On how the structure of our family changed, and how that played out on our emotional growth and maturity."
Isabel stormed back in. Her hair, unbound and tumbling past her shoulders, flew behind her like a flag, and her eyes were blazing in her pink-cheeked face. "No way, that bitch does not get papers. She doesn't deserve papers written about her."
"Isabel," I cautioned quietly. "It's not your decision."
"Then why is she asking us for our opinion?"
All four of us fell quiet. Claire, as wild as she'd been as a child, had mellowed more quickly than Lia had once they reached high school. She was an observer of life, of the people around her, like Isabel was, while Lia still held that boundless energy that had been a hallmark of their youth. She was like a live wire, always bouncing, always tapping her foot, always seeking an outlet for the force bound behind her skin. Yet despite that, she was quietly watching our middle sister, eyes bright with unshed tears at how quickly she turned to anger at the topic of Brooke.
"I'm asking your opinion because I love and respect you," Claire said.
Isabel relaxed, her shoulders losing a bit of their tightness.
Lia looked at Claire and smiled sadly. "But opinion is different than permission, isn't it? You don’t need our permission to do this."
Leave it to those two. The thought had flowed from Claire to Lia without skipping a beat. Claire nodded. "It is."
My eyes fell shut because we all knew what that meant.
"What do you think, Mol?" Claire asked.
Words crowded my throat because as much as I knew moments like this required me to act as the firstborn, I didn't feel like that was me. But I was.
I'd always been content to let Logan assert his role as firstborn, the big brother and father figure we'd so desperately needed when we were younger. So even though I was the oldest of my four sisters, my feet had never filled those shoes. Not really.
I didn't want to tell Claire what to do because what if I steered her wrong? What if agreeing that doing the paper on Brooke's impact on our family structure was equivalent to setting off a
nuclear bomb in our tight-knit little circle? That was the last thing I wanted. Our family kicked ass. I loved our family. Tuesday nights were the highlight of every single week for me.
The idea that Brooke's ghost, though she was still very much alive, could punch through that, filled me with dread. But it wasn't my place to lay the mantle of my opinion on my younger sister's education.
Because it was only that. My opinion.
"I think I've had too much wine for this conversation," I admitted weakly.
"Cop out," Isabel said.
I glared at her. Claire sighed.
"Did you ask Logan?" Lia asked.
"Why does he get an opinion?" Isabel shot back. “Brooke is our burden to bear, not his.”
Claire straightened on the couch. "You know, your anger on this particular subject gets really fricken annoying after a while."
I held up my hands. "Knock it off, you two."
"Logan is the head of this family," Lia said. “That’s why he gets an opinion."
I rubbed my temples, where the beginning of a headache was starting to bloom. To think, I could have been wandering around a big, beautiful house and helping Noah spend all his money on it. But no, I chose my sisters because family came first.
Around me, the noise increased from all three of them. Lia and Claire joined forces, which they always did, and Isabel squared off in the doorway to the family room, not intimidated in the slightest by the two-against-one odds, like always.
No one even noticed that I sat there, eyes closed and wishing I was anywhere else. I didn't want to talk about Brooke. I didn't want to listen to my sisters argue about which woman had the greater impact in our life and why Claire's paper somehow changed the definition of that role.
"You guys," I interrupted. "Could you stop, please?"
No one listened. Lia had stood from the couch. "You know, I’m so sick of you acting like you carry around some different wound than the rest of us. Brooke left all of us, Iz. Just because you haven’t worked through your own shit doesn’t mean your opinion counts more."
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