Chapter Fourteen

Miles

B old and black and enigmatic, the words stare at me from behind the cold white of my screen.

Zoe : I can't be with you anymore. This isn't working. We're not working. I'm leaving. Please, don't come after me. I don't want to see you again. I'm sorry.

Though enigmatic isn't the correct word. The message couldn't be clearer. It just doesn't make any sense.

What, exactly, is not working? Our relationship that technically doesn't exist?

She can't be with me? Anymore? She wants to put an end to our deal?

She's leaving? Leaving what, who, where? That seems a little extreme.

Most of all, she's apologizing? Of her own free will? Suspicious.

All thoughts and hypotheses my brain forms end with a question mark.

I was in the middle of a particularly torturous physical therapy session, still recovering from my injury, when my phone pinged once. I'd been immensely thankful for the distraction and mildly delighted—and surprised—to find Zoe's name awaiting on the screen.

We don't text often. Well, Zoe doesn't text me often. I, however, slightly overuse her number. In our long thread of texts, the only bubble from her side is a grid of four pictures taken with her phone for social media purposes, swallowed and smashed between the long list of my lengthy audio messages she probably never listens to.

I scroll until I find the pictures, painting my fingerprint over them for the thousandth time.

One after the other, I trace the evolution of the blush on her cheeks. I've memorized it at this point, every hue and every shape, as it grows and deepened until it illuminates her face in the most intimate light.

She's absolutely exquisite. Otherworldly. Made of things that transcend this world, moonlight and stardust and fucking magic.

It's in her eyes. Up close and in real life, they're not just blue or green or gray, always greedy to be all the colors. Yet it's dark, their hue on my screen.

Much like her eyes, Zoe remains an enigma I can't decipher. Every time I think I'm close, a new light tilts from a different angle upon her, showing me a little more of her—and I'm left to frame the person I know within a past I don't know.

Every time I feel remotely confident that we're making progress, she proves me to be but a hopeful fool .

One step forward, ten fucking steps back.

The screen goes black for the third time.

When in doubt, the answer is a joke. Isn't that what I always do? Steer the conversation with a laugh to safer territory. Especially—particularly—when it comes to Zoe.

Why stop now? Why divert from a philosophy that has proved oh-so fruitful?

Miles : What about the summer wedding we've been planning so diligently? I refuse to let all my Pinterest boards go to waste.

I set my phone back down with a groan as the physical therapist, Chace, presses one particular sore spot in my groin, praying for my girlfriend's sweet venom to distract from the torture of a massage.

But it never comes, and the torture continues without distraction.

One, two, ten minutes and the ping never echoes again. Only the pang of uneasiness that spreads from its embryo right above my heart with every second of radio silence.

Again, the lack of answer isn't rare or unprecedented. It's the standard. Combined with the cryptic start of the conversation, though, it raises all my pores in pinpricks, and my skin itches.

Something isn't right.

Something feels wrong .

The bugs under my skin are awakened. Not the old prickly things that whispered—these scream with fangs and claws that sink with ferocity and foreboding so sharp that I almost miss the old ones. Those have been dormant, mute, I now realize.

My muscles lock with uneasiness, prompting Chace to ask, "Everything okay, man?"

"Yeah. Just got a weird text from my girl, is all," I reply without thinking.

Which is all I'll say, already more than I planned to divulge. I won't discuss Zoe with anyone else.

"Women. There's no getting them. Those minds work in different ways." His deprecating chuckle grates on my frazzled nerves. "Want my advice?"

"Not really, no."

Exactly as suspected, he ignores my rejection. "Apologize. Tell her she's right. Get her flowers. Or jewelry. Chicks like shiny expensive shit."

Thankfully, my face is buried in the crook of my arm. Otherwise he would see my opinions on his sage advice.

"I am sorry. For the poor soul who makes the mistake of marrying you."

He chuckles again, like it's a joke—a funny one—then declares the torture concluded.

Fucking finally .

I need to go home.

The muscular injury in my adductor has plagued me for weeks.

It erased my name from the call for the national team, reducing my participation in the international break to the attendance of a friendly game—in the stands.

Injuries are the number one nemesis of any athlete, thieves that steal the opportunities I've been fighting for all my life. But this time, it didn't feel like the universe robbed me, but conspired bigger than my human aspirations.

The reason was Tobias Westwood.

Toby and I met in a one-minute-elevator-ride in the Lucilla, which, much unlike his granddaughter, was precisely how long it took to strike a fast friendship. I asked which floor he was headed to, and with the answer 39, the family ties were unveiled. In a fortunate turn of events, Zoe wasn't home, so us boys ended up holding a cup of tea and a conversation in which I learned to eradicate the word soccer from my dictionary permanently.

A little over one year later, as soon as I heard his England would be playing a friendly match in Boston, I extended a proposal: see his selection in his second home.

He doubly surprised me by countering my offer: why get tickets, when he owned a box?

"Last time I was here, my little bee was so little."

He looked around, reacquainting himself with a home he thought he'd lost, adjusting his eyes to long years of distance.

"What's the deal with you Westwoods and the bees?"

There was so much homesickness when he responded. Nostalgia and the love and the pain that would never disappear—and acceptance of that, too.

"My wife's name is Beatrice. I called her B. So, Zoe—Zoe Beatrice Westwood—declared she wanted to be a bee like her grandma. She's our little bee."

By the time he spoke in plural, my vocal cords had tangled into countless tiny knots. I couldn't speak—surely wouldn't have known what words to offer. Toby stared at the white stripes that inundated the playing field, offering a moment of reprieve to us both.

And he carried on.

"I haven't been here in almost two decades. Wasn't planning on coming back either. But my Zoe is trying. She might not realize it yet, but she's trying. What kind of grandpa would I be if I didn't try, too? She deserves everything I can do for her, torturous as it is—and if that's facing my pain, so be it."

Far from a full house, the seats began to empty swiftly. The entrances became exits, what had been everything only minutes prior, a culmination of past and present and future wrapped in 90 minutes of emotion, now became memories in the pocket.

"When my wife died, the biggest part of me died with her. It felt wrong to exist without her, to experience life when she was not here to do it with me. I withdrew from life—refused to live, quite simply."

The gentle blow of the grass-wind in the late afternoon was a delicate hand that caressed his gray hair in a show of support, granting him the strength to finish his memoir. He rested his overwhelmed throat for a moment, the roar of the crowd fading with their steps back to their own lives.

"I was so entrapped in my own grief that I lost sight of everything around me." A perpetual shake rocked his head with every word he spoke, like he was scolding himself without stop—like he'd been doing it for a long time. "My son... The death of his mother changed him in ways I'll never comprehend. Not six months had passed since B's death and his bags were packed to Europe. He never looked back. He just… left everything behind—his daughter, his wife."

And his father, too.

Although he didn't mention it outright, he didn't conceal it. Toby missed his son. It was humbling, witnessing the old man as he dared to remain so jovial and vulnerable in the face of so much loss and heartbreak.

The wrinkled smile he always wore camouflaged the heavy grief he carried inside—or perhaps it was Toby who refused to let the heavyweight drag down his smile. Perhaps he'd come to see that grief wasn't just the pain of loss—it was evidence of the love that would always remain upon death and departure.

"Miranda—God knows I love that child like my own—but she was always too busy being the daughter her father demanded to be able to be Zoe's mom."

Toby pinned me with the sky-blue gaze he shared with his granddaughter, though his was clean of any traces of grays or greens.

"Zoe was barely ten, left all alone to grieve the loss of her second mother, to navigate the abandonment of her father—and mine, too, as much as it pains me to say. In a matter of months, she'd lost her family. She had no one to turn to but herself. Who she is today is the reflection of that little girl. She locked herself inside, and she hasn't found the key. But she's searching, now."

If I thought that was it, I was mistaken.

That was the introduction to all the things, so many things, he told me.

That during those times he was lost, the only steady presence in Zoe's life was her maternal grandfather—and how he took advantage of the fragility of a little girl to shape her into the legacy he wanted her to perpetuate.

That, although she rebelled eventually, she didn't escape the restraints put inside her head. By then, the damage was done and deep, Zoe irrevocably changed by the selfishness of those who were supposed to always put her first.

Toby opened a bottle of aged concerns and remorse. It poured so much light on the woman I know today that all I could see was the warm fluttery feeling in my heart multiplying under it for the little girl and the woman she had become.

Tobias unfolded his hands from his lap to grab mine, curled in a fist, and squeezed it.

"I'm happy she has you. She deserves someone who makes her the center of their world—someone who sees the whole world in her."

I felt my nod, because that's what she is.

My whole world.

"Don't let the cold act fool you—ice can splint and shatter, too. And underneath all those shields lives a sensitive girl who never learned that her feelings aren't weaknesses or weapons—they're human. When she pushes you away, push back. When she runs, you follow her. Don't let her go, son. Don't give up on her."

As I drive home to Zoe to do just that—to follow her, fight for her—I replay his words on loop.

To solidify my decision—or to shift it.

Deep down, though, I know it's been made.

It's time to go all in. If that requires me to show all my cards, I will. If I have to risk it all for the possibility, I will.

There's nothing, absolutely nothing, I'm not willing to do for just the possibility of Zoe .

Of us.

I hear it as soon as the ding of the elevator ricochets against the hollow hall.

The silence.

The floor is as always. Two deep brown doors, mirrors of one another, matte floors of the exact same hue of gray, and the wall made of glass staring at the same view it's forever destined to.

But it's not the usual silence that speaks of absence.

It's a silence that holds its breath, whose bones became stone.

It's a pulsing stillness before the storm—or in its aftermath.

I've made it home in record time after a fair share of running yellows and moderate speeding. It helped that, unlike most days, no fans loitered around the training facilities for a picture, not even the regulars, like Lucy, who comes around almost daily these days.

Sharp fangs sink deeper until they seize bone and puncture—commanding me forward and incapacitating me altogether, all at the same time.

Only when the steel doors begin to close do my feet move—reluctant at first, then careful.

Door 39-04 isn't closed. It's not ajar, only an acute angle that allows me to peek at the bare wall of the hall and see nothing.

I should knock, I think, but I can't make myself disturb the pulsing silence.

So I trudge inside, uninvited and unannounced.

I have walked these same steps so many times. Today, though, my feet don't fit the usual three footprints on the floor, from door to door. Today they're smaller. Slower.

As soon as I enter the living room door, sunlight filters through the windows to kiss my antsy skin.

It doesn't blind me.

I can see.

I see.

And I see bees.

All I see is little bees as they bathe in a pool of crimson.

There's an unending album of candid pictures of Zoe Beatrice Westwood archived in a corner of my mind.

My eyes fall upon her, and every time they blink, they capture the simple tilt of her smile, the parallel lines of her frown or the scrunch in her nose, and they store it behind my eyelids for safekeeping.

The last picture in my collection is Zoe's crumpled silhouette as life trickled down her temple and drained out of her into a pond of red in the rug.

Bees and blood.

For the eternity of a second, I froze.

I'm still there, inside that moment, as I drop into a visitor's chair beside Zoe's bed on a floor whose number I can't recall, after a drive to the hospital I barely remember—only that they wouldn't allow me to ride in the ambulance.

I'm still in that one small second that stretched into eternity as soon as fragile yellow wings came to view masqueraded in sticky crimson paint.

I don't know how long has passed. It's pointless to check. My fingers still shake as they did when I dialed three numbers, so the screen will remain the same blur as then. Everything around us is fog that drips in pitter-patters of blood.

Breathing in, breathing out, my heart refuses to slow. It's desperate to forget, but it deserves only the torture of memory. Numb, it plummets loudly against all the hollow walls of my body. I can't tell if the shallow thump under my fingertips in the delicate skin of her wrist is hers beating against mine, or mine willing hers back to life.

Unable to watch and unable to look away from her, unconscious, unmoving, lost to a place where I can't reach for her, fight for her. I want to slide down the dirty walls until I'm nothing but a pool of terror and remorse at her feet.

Instead, I'm left to simmer in the blood that coats my fingers, sticks under my nails. I claw at them, feverishly trying to carve it out.

I failed her. I failed to protect the woman I claim to love, and my failure landed her directly in a hospital bed.

My elbows dig into my thighs as my head falls between my shoulders dragged by the weight of the guilt.

I want to rip my chest open with my bare hands and tuck her behind my ribcage, right next to my heart where she belongs, where she's made a permanent address, to keep her safe.

But the rip is a tectonic shift, and I'm already cracked in half .

"Zoe," I say, barely recognizing my own voice, trampled by pain and panic. "Please, wake up. Come back to me, love."

There are so many things I haven't told her.

All I've done is let her believe all the lies we told each other.

All I've done is lie, lie, lie, yet punishment fell upon her.

And isn't Zoe the most thorough torture I could receive for my sins?

I count every breath and every second until the next one comes, my own exhales timed with the precious beep of her heart on the monitor. It finally dissolves the buzz inside my skull, the dull deafening echo of a million bees, and I can hear myself thinking.

All I think is why?

Why is Zoe lying unconscious in a hospital bed while I stand in perfect shape?

Why would anyone hurt her?

Why her?

Why not me?

Why?

Why?