“Yeah. He’s lost a good bit of his hearing over the years. He wears hearing aids when he’s out of the ring, and those seem to help, but we use a lot of sign language.”
“He’s deaf?” I gasped, and my face must have paled, because she reached out and squeezed my hand.
“No! He’s . . . just . . . heading in that direction,” she amended. “He can still hear some, and with his hearing aids, it’s significantly better. I’m only telling you this because tonight, at dinner, you’ll probably be the only one who doesn’t know sign. Sometimes, when the guys get going, they’ll forget to talk.”
I stared blankly ahead as the weight of having been on the run for the last three years sank in. “I can’t believe I missed all this,” I told her without looking in her direction. “First, it was Flint’s first steps. Now, Q’s deaf.”
“Oh, Flint’s first steps were no big deal.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?” I yelled entirely too loudly. “He told me the exact same thing. I’m sorry, but walking is a huge deal!”
She was sitting only a few inches away, but I’m relatively sure half the gym heard me.
“Shhh,” she urged, looking over her shoulder to see how many people had witnessed my sudden outburst. “I didn’t mean it like that, Ash. It’s just . . . His first steps weren’t a big deal. It was the day he put away the wheelchair for good that was so huge for him. That was the day he regained a part of his life. I went with him and Till when he donated his wheelchairs. I begged him to keep one—just in case, ya know? But he was adamant that he wanted them all gone. With the exception of this afternoon, I’ve never in my life seen Flint happier than that day when he walked back to the car wheelchair-free.”
With the exception of this afternoon.
I looked down at my lap as my cheeks began to flush.
Yeah, I was pretty happy this afternoon too.
“Besides, you should never listen to anything Flint says is no big deal. He graduated college in two years.” She threw up a pair of air quotes then said, “‘No big deal.’ He landed one of the biggest professional boxers on the scene his first week on the job.” More air quotes. “‘No big deal.’ The kid used a lump sum of money Till had given him as a graduation present to buy a house at twenty-two.” She looked at me.
“No big deal?” I guessed.
“Not to Flint.” She shrugged. “There has been exactly one ‘big deal’ as long as I’ve known him.” She leaned in close and reiterated. “One. Any guesses?”
Oh, I had a guess. I just wasn’t brave enough to utter it. I shook my head instead.
“You,” she whispered with a smile before her face shifted to serious. “Ash, you seem like a great girl, and I can’t wait to get to know you, but I’ll be very honest here. We’re all worried about how this is going to go down with you two. The reason we poured every resource we had into finding you is because if Flint thought you were a big deal, then it was infinitely bigger than that. It was the enormous, life-changing, forever kind of deal.”
My eyes glistened as I became fascinated with my shoes to hide the emotion her words were causing.
“I don’t know what to say,” I told the ground.
“Say that you’re serious about him.”
I could have said that. It would have been the truth. But for some reason, I had more important things to air out.
I lifted my head to stare into her kind eyes. “I hate you,” I told her.
“I know,” she replied, seemingly unfazed. “You made that pretty clear this afternoon.”
“Eliza, by all accounts, you’re only one step away from sainthood as far as the Page brothers are concerned. But knowing how he felt about you . . . I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but they were strange. She didn’t look like a woman who had just been injured by words. She looked . . . happy.
“And I’m completely okay with that as long as you love him.”
Forget the one step. Sainthood has been achieved.
“I . . .” I opened my mouth just to close it again.
“Ash, when this conversation ends, I’m going back to pretending I don’t know how you feel about me. All I’m asking is that you truly consider how you feel about Flint before you shred him again over his misinterpreted feelings about me. I think of him as a son and nothing more.”
“It was never about the way you felt for him!” I snapped.
She bit right back, “Then let it go! Don’t punish the man for the thoughts of a boy.” Pausing, she flipped her long, brown hair and looked around to make sure no one was watching our quiet altercation. “When you took off, Flint was a mess. He over-rationalized how he felt about you. He couldn’t possibly have fallen in love with a sixteen-year-old girl he’d only known for a month. That shit didn’t happen in his guarded and square existence. But it did, Ash. Now, tell me that you share these feelings . . . even in the past. And you can go back to hating me all you want.”