Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

PRESLEY

I’ve been antsy all day, even though it’s nothing compared to how Brock must be feeling. But every sports commentator in the business is weighing in about Brock’s future, and none of them are saying anything good.

Lincoln stops by the training room when I’m helping Eli stretch out the leg he bruised on Thursday. “Everything’s going to be fine,” Lincoln says, and it’s embarrassing that my emotions must be written all over my face.

“Have you heard from Brock?” I ask. I’ve gone back and forth on whether I should just text him about it. Are we that close yet? It’s hard to say. So much of our friendship is built around TOK, even though there’s more to it than the books. But when we do have the deeper conversations, we both seem to revert to book talk when we want to lighten things up.

Lincoln grimaces. “I haven’t. But no matter what happens, he’ll land on his feet. Brock is one of the best left tackles in the league. If the Devils let him go, someone’s going to sign him.”

“But what about the way people talk about him—the commentators, social media? They make it seem like this is really bad.” I can’t help but worry about how the reputation that the Devils have fed to make him the scape goat will affect his career. Left-tackles don’t normally have this kind of spotlight, and the spotlight that Brock’s unfairly gotten is hurting him now.

Lincoln lets out a scoff. “People who actually know what they’re talking about can see through the hype. Someone will sign him, Pres.”

Maybe being free of the Devils would be for the best. Brock deserves a team that appreciates him.

Lincoln’s words do their job though and ease my worries. Brock has handled a lot in his life. He can handle this too.

I just hate that it has to be this way for him.

I wait as long as I possibly can before breaking down and texting Brock around ten p.m. That way, if he’s already in bed, he can easily ignore my text if he doesn’t want to talk about it.

Presley: I’ve been thinking about you all day. How are you?

He answers much quicker than I expected. The bubbles pop up instantly and then his text comes through.

Brock: Team-less for the moment.

I immediately switch over to my phone app. I’d do a Facetime call, but Brock might not want anyone to see him right now. I tap on his name to call him.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.” Tightness winds in my chest. Lincoln said everything would be fine, but that doesn’t stop the ache I feel at Brock’s dejected tone. “This sucks.”

He laughs softly, surprising me. “No TOK quote?”

“I don’t think ‘This sucks,’ is a phrase common in fantasy novels, to be honest.”

“Maybe in book sixteen.” Brock’s voice has lightened a tiny bit, which unwinds some of the tension in me. He lets out a sigh. “In some ways, it’s a relief.”

I glare at my lap, wishing I could be there with Brock now. “ The Devils don’t deserve you. There’s another team out there right now, ready to snatch you up.”

I hear another sigh from his end, this one with less frustration than the first. “My agent says a couple teams have called, so that’s promising.”

“Brock, that’s more than promising.” I pump my fist into the air in silent celebration. “You just got let go today. Of course everyone else is smarter than the Devils.”

Brock chuckles, another reason for celebration. “I know I’m going to be fine,” he says quietly.

“But?” There’s something in his voice that tugs at my heart, a vulnerability he doesn’t let out very often. I know a lot of Brock’s story, how his dad left when he was young and how much he struggled because of it. How hard his mom worked to give him the best she could, to afford the equipment and the fees to play on competitive travel teams to get him where he is now. It’s important he’s told me these things, but they’re also a part of Brock’s story that a lot of people know.

“I’m tired of having to prove myself over and over again.”

“I’m sorry.” What else do I say? It’s not fair. He’s a great football player, but he had to work hard for his scholarship to USC, send out a lot of tapes, have his coach make a lot of calls just to get colleges to look at him. He wasn’t drafted, and he had to try out to even make it on a pro team—the Pumas. “It sucks, Brock. It really does. It’s not fair.”

“That time I thought for sure you’d have some perseverance quote for me.”

I head into my bedroom where my aunt’s TOK quote book is sitting on my nightstand. I flip it open. “‘You’re surprisingly bad at not walking straight into traps.’” I read the first one I come across and then laugh. “Why did she write that one down?”

“It’s one of the best things Brynna ever says.” Brock’s own laughter paints his words. “I think I have that highlighted in my copy. ”

“Well. Words to live by, I guess.”

“You can always count on TOK,” Brock says. “Even when you can’t count on anything else.”

His words hold more seriousness than they should, and my heart twists at how true that must be in his life. “Amen,” I say.

I haven’t heard anything from Brock by the end of the next day, and Lincoln didn’t know anything either when he came in for his treatment with one of the other trainers this morning. There’re a lot of details to work out to get Brock signed with another team, and I force myself to believe there have already been offers.

But I can’t keep texting him like I’m his girlfriend, with a right to know all the details of his life.

Gah! Why am I not his girlfriend with the right to know?

I have a huge crush, and I have no idea how Brock feels about me. We talk all the time, and our conversations feel like more than just friendship to me. Doesn’t his coming over to my house late on Thanksgiving mean something? He could have stayed at Lincoln’s, but he didn’t. Because the Devils lost to the Rays?

I’m a mess.

Thankfully, Mom calls me less than an hour after I get home from work so I don’t have too long to spiral. I answer the FaceTime call as I hang up the last of my Christmas tree decorations. “Hey, Mom. What’s up?”

She’s laughing, and it takes her a few seconds to calm down enough to answer. “You will not believe…” She has to interrupt herself to laugh again. “What Alexandra Westcott is doing right now .”

The last time my mom was this amused by Mrs. Westcott’s antics was the time she went around the neighborhood measuring everyone’s lawn with the ruler and then getting into an argument with the president of the HOA after a bunch of people, including my dad, called to complain about her.

I don’t have to guess before Mom turns the phone around and shows me the view of the neighborhood from her front window. I can see Mrs. Westcott standing on the porch of the house across the street from Mom’s, wearing a black pantsuit, the blazer trimmed in white, and her hair pulled into a sensible chignon. She’s wearing white heels in contrast, and this whole picture is funny enough in and of itself that I wouldn’t need Mom to tell me why she’s waving her arms emphatically at the man at the front door to get a good laugh.

“She has been going house. To. House,” Mom says, little bursts of laughter interrupting the last few words. “Insisting she has the right to search their property for the missing ring.”

“What?” I burst out, the word shaking with laughter. “How? How does she have the right?”

“I’m not sure!” My laughter has fed Mom’s, and her words are turning high pitched with her amusement. “I was laughing so hard when she came here, I had to go upstairs, and your dad is so mad I ditched him that he won’t tell me. But something about the whole neighborhood being suspects since we were all at her party last year.”

“It will be a miracle if anyone shows up this year,” I point out.

“Sweetie, most of the neighborhood, including us, are going just to see what she does! Did you see her rant on Facebook yesterday about the police doing nothing to solve this crime? She was trying to rally people to defund LAPD over it. It’s ludicrous.”

I have to admit, finding out how the self-styled detective is going to use her party to root out the thief is a good reason to still go to her party. Also the food is usually top notch.

Mom flips me back around, and we talk about work for a few minutes before she says she has to go and ask her next-door neighbor what Mrs. Westcott said to her. She hangs up before I can beg her to stay on the phone to distract me.

I huff and grab the box of Aunt Shannon’s things I never finished going through. That will distract me. I pull out all the stuff I’ve already looked at—the letters, the jewelry, and the trinkets. They’re all sitting on top, so I set them carefully on my bed and start pulling out other things to examine.

I pick up a book-sized brown paper bag and carefully slide the book out of it. It’s a collector’s edition copy of TOK book fifteen, Rebirth of Darkness . I already have this one. It’s one of the collection that has the cover art redone by a fan artist who’s now become famous for her fantasy book covers. Story is that Thornridge saw something she’d posted online and insisted on doing all fifteen books with her art. Only fifty sets were printed, which makes them kind of rare. Are they rare when there aren’t that many fans to begin with? Brock has this collector’s edition too.

So much for distraction.

I open the front cover and gasp. This one is signed by Gideon Thornridge. Miss Tatum, You have the most charming aunt. She tells me you’re something of a fan. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Gideon Thornridge .

Aunt Shannon has left no explanation for how she came to meet Gideon Thornridge and never told me about it. I don’t have any other signed copies. He’s a hermit, or something. The only signing he ever did was before I got into the books. Someone online posted once that it was after the first book came out and someone brought him a copy of Lord of the Rings to sign, thinking he was somehow J.R.R. Tolkein. Thornridge was so offended—maybe on Tolkein’s behalf—that he refused to do another signing after that. That might not be the real story, but the fact remains that as rare as the collector’s edition is, signed books by Thornridge are even rarer. From what I can tell in the forum, about twenty-five people have signed copies.

And I’m holding one of them.

That’s when I start sobbing. I want more than anything to text Aunt Shannon in all caps WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?!? But I can’t. Because she left this in a box with zero explanation. She’d been gathering things for a while when she died suddenly—a fatal fall, thanks to progressing muscle weakness from the disease. But it was all cut so short. Did she mean to leave a note explaining everything and she didn’t get to it? It’s another instance of feeling short-changed by her death, feeling like we should have had more time to say goodbye.

I lay face down on my bed, crying for a solid twenty minutes. Silver lining: this is a distraction from not hearing from Brock.

I can text him now about the book. It’ll blow his mind.

I should actually Facetime him so he can see it.

Maybe he needs a distraction. I’m so antsy, and I’m not even the one with my future to worry about. I pick up my phone to call and then set it back down. I’m in no state to talk to Brock, especially if things are still up in the air for him. Thanks to the sobbing, my emotions are still on edge. I’ll probably start crying again if I call Brock, and that’s the last thing he needs—dealing with my tears when he may want to shed some of his own.

I put the book on my nightstand and continue looking through the box, wary of what it will unleash on me next. I find a few of Aunt Shannon’s favorite books, which isn’t surprising. A couple romcoms—she was a sucker for them—and a literary novel she made me read with her that I despised. None of them are signed.

At the bottom of the box is a black velvet ring case. My eyebrows shoot up. The other jewelry that Aunt Shannon left me were all random pieces she knew would mean something to me: the necklace I got her for Christmas one year, or earrings from a boyfriend who turned out to be the worst and she started wearing them as a joke. I laughed so hard when she wore them to meet one of my boyfriends once. (Funny story, he turned out to be the worst too. That’s probably why she gave me the earrings. )

Something about this box though feels different, so I steel myself.

It still doesn’t prepare me for what I see. I gasp, then squeal, then drop the velvet box and cover my mouth with both hands.

It’s the Christmas ring Mom and I were talking about.

The stolen one.