"Troy. I didn't think you knew I was staying here. I suppose I have Dani to thank for this?" I should be pissed that he's here uninvited, but I'm not.
"Please don't blame her," Troy says, and I can't be mad at Dani either. I knew that after Troy gave me his phone number I was avoiding calling him, even though I shouldn't have. I just kept putting it off, hoping the problem would solve itself. I should have called him, but I didn't. Now, he's standing outside my door, and the magnetism is back, and I feel like fate is taking control again. "I damn near begged her in her backyard while their neighbor's dog yapped at a thousand barks an hour."
I can't help it. I smile. "All right, I won't blame her. She just did the right thing anyway. I should have called you. Would you like to come inside?"
Troy nods, and I turn, leading him into the living room. "Have a seat on the sofa. We can talk there. You want something to drink? Water, some Gatorade or something? I'm not sure what a professional athlete like you drinks."
"Careful which player you ask that to," Troy replies with a chuckle. "A lot of my teammates would hit you up for a beer."
"Dani told me you're totally dry. I'll be the first to say I support you in that, but I do sometimes have a glass of red wine with dinner. You can't spend five years in Europe without becoming used to that."
"That's okay, I don't worry about what other people do there. Just . . . I won't let myself down that road, even in the littlest step,” Troy says, pausing while I disappear into the kitchen. I come back with a couple of glasses of apple juice. It's Laurie's favorite and it’s cold. "Thanks. I guess you know why I came by."
"I do," I reply, and I take a sip of my juice to settle my nerves. "We've got a lot to talk about."
Troy nods. "I'll be honest with you, Whitney. When I saw you last week at the stadium . . . it scraped a scab that I thought was a scar."
I nod in understanding. "I'm sorry about that. If it means anything, it reopened a lot of closets that I thought I'd locked closed a long time ago too. No, that's not true. The doors might have been closed, but there were still things stirring inside, even after five years."
Troy nods and sighs. "So where do we begin? I don't want to sound like a melodramatic hysteric, but all I have inside me are hysterical questions. Maybe it's better . . . safer if I just let you tell me what you want to tell, and then we can go from there."
I laugh softly and take another sip of juice. "You've become a bit of a nerd in the past few years. I don't think the Troy I knew would have even used words like melodramatic hysteric. Clement was good for you."
"Coach Jackson was good for me. After the season, he took me in and made sure I had a roof over my head and clothes on my back. More importantly, though, he personally guided every step of my college prep. He was the one who cracked the books, who made sure in the dark days that I didn't give up, and made sure I was ready come May for graduation and to go to college."
"When I left Silver Lake Falls, I wasn't sure what I was doing. I just knew I had to do it. I'll get to the why later. I had Laurie in late May, and afterward, I went to university in Europe. I'd already gotten into art and art history by then, and so when Lorenzo offered to go into business with me—his family has some money—I went all-in. For the past two years or so, he and I worked with clients to find art to bring to the States."
"You told me," Troy says, and sips his juice again. "What changed?"
"Laurie," I say honestly. "She's so smart for her age, and maybe I dote on her too much, but she's also precocious, which I guess is another word to say willful, stubborn, and some would say spoiled. Oh, she's charming enough that she gets away with it a lot, but I couldn't have that in her life any longer. In Europe, a pretty little girl like her would be spoiled irretrievably rotten. So, that combined with those rattlings in the closet I mentioned earlier led me to decide that I had to move us back to the United States."
"And Lorenzo's fine with that?" Troy asks. "I mean, he seemed a bit uncomfortable at the cafe, and to be honest, as Laurie's father, he should have a say in it."
I move my foot and wince when I step on one of Laurie's Legos. She loves the things, but she leaves them all over the place and never quite gets them all picked up. "Ouch. Troy . . . Lorenzo isn't Laurie's father."
"What? But you two . . . and the way he seems to care about her . . . I don't understand."
The air is heavy, and I can barely breathe, but I decide to just charge through. "Troy, Lorenzo and I—we dated for a while, but it never worked out because I never loved him. Or to put it a better way, I loved him, but I was never in love with him. He's going back to Italy because of it, because of what was between us all the time. Do you understand?"