“I sat under those bleachers all night, waiting for you to come back. You didn’t answer my calls. Didn’t respond to my texts. And then you told me you were done with me. You didn’t even ask what he said to me. He called my mother a whore, Ash. He was terrible to your mother, too. A real charmer you’ve got there. How can you believe anything he says?”

She sank down on the bench next to her, breathing hard. Something was very wrong. She looked up at him and he knew her response would change everything. Like the silence in a piece of music before it hits a crescendo.

“He died.”

The muted horror in her eyes said there was more.

“When?”

Her hand pressed into her belly. “Twelve years this month.”

“Twelve years this month,” his whisper echoed hers, knowing exactly where they’d been twelve years ago. Done with high school. Excited about their future together. She on her way to UCLA on a soccer scholarship. Him taking a year off. Maybe coaching for their high school until he had enough money to figure out what he wanted to do. His father’s friend, his old coach from Rio, had taken a managerial position with Sunderland and he’d been trying to get Rico to try out. But at that point playing had still felt impossible.

He sat down next to her, but she was staring straight ahead at the gold wallpaper.

“How did it happen?”

Her hands clasped together and pressed into her lips, memories flashing in her eyes, creasing her forehead.

“He shot himself in the head.” She spoke the words loud and clear, as though practicing diction. “That day.”

“Oh God.” He lifted his hand to reach for hers, but she jerked back.

Silence wrapped around them, a silence so corrosive, it shoved miles and years between them.

“That’s why you didn’t come back.”

She laughed again, or maybe it was a sob. There were no tears in her eyes. “The family kept the suicide out of the papers.”

When he’d tried to reach her he’d imagined every scenario except this one. The only response he’d gotten from her was that she was done with him. Rico hadn’t wanted to believe that her father had convinced her that he wasn’t good enough for her. But he’d seen her horror at his anger at her father and he’d believed it. He had walked away and never let himself turn back. Now he wondered if the horror in her eyes had been about her thinking he was leaving her.