I wasn’t pro yet. I didn’t have a job, didn’t have time to get a job. And without the help from my dad, taking out more loans was the only answer — if I could even get approved for them.

Panic seized my chest, but it was a muted stress, like I was already dying and someone just told me as if I didn’t already know. I felt eerily calm inside that overwhelm, as if I deserved this punishment, as if it was my own fault that Mom was an addict, that she was in the trouble she was in.

Even if I could convince myself it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t do that if I walked away from her now, if I turned my back on the opportunity to quite literally save her life.

I closed my eyes, heart squeezing so painfully I doubled over as the cost of this weighed in on me.

Giana.

It would be her on the other end of this fake relationship, now — one I would never be able to tell her about. Maliyah would never know it wasn’t real, either.

To her, to Giana, to everyone, it would be real — it would be me getting back together with my ex just like they thought I’d do all along.

Like I once thought I’d do.

Now, it made me sick to even think about.

I longed to have my own father there, to have him tell me what to do and actually be able to trust it. But he wasn’t a man I admired, a man I wanted to be like.

Cory was.

My head spun, heart cracking more and more with each devastating blow.

I had no choice.

This was my mother. My mother. The woman who stayed with me, who kept me in the face of every odd, who provided for me and supported me and believed in me and loved me.

I couldn’t leave her to fend for herself.

It didn’t matter if Giana would never understand, if no one would. This was the choice I had to make not only as a man, but as a son.

She depended on me.

And unlike my father, I wouldn’t let her down.

No matter the pain and hell it would cause me.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Giana

I had entirely too much hair to be whipping it around in such a passionate show of head banging, but I didn’t care.

My curls bounced and flew around me as I danced and sang to Lizzo on the Friday night before our home game against the Hawks, glasses sliding down the bridge of my nose with every pump of my hips. The spatula in my hand was the microphone, the fuzzy socks on my feet serving as perfect twirling material when I sashayed from the stove to the sink to drain the angel hair pasta.