Honor swore to her parents they must have adopted her or found her in a cabbage patch because she was nothing like her siblings. She was so much softer. More empathetic. She lacked the ruthless drive to succeed, to be successful at everything she did like her siblings did. They called her a softy. Too kindhearted and tender to survive in the “real world,” as they called it. And yet the world she lived in was the epitome of survival. Nothing at all like her family’s safe jobs, safe homes, safe lives.
Her father was a former all-star athlete. He’d played multiple sports but had gone to college on a football scholarship and had even been drafted to the pros. But by then he’d met and fallen in love with her mother, and he’d told his children often that he wanted nothing more than to be at home with her and for her to have his children. A house full.
Most doubted his sincerity, and Honor’s mother said that even she’d been skeptical at first. She hadn’t thought her husband would be happy just walking away from such a lucrative career in the spotlight. But he’d never displayed one ounce of regret, and only a year after they married, they had their first child.
Playing pro ball would have kept him from home for the majority of the year. There was spring training camp. There was the entire football season and the playoffs if the team made it to postseason play. There was no doubt her father could have been one of the greats, but instead, he’d taken a high school coaching job in Kentucky, where he and her mother had chosen to live and raise their family.
It was a small town in Kentucky, not so northern that it came too close to the line between north and south. It had the hallmark of every southern town. Open, friendly and welcoming. Small enough that everyone knew everyone else and as a result, everyone’s business was also known.
Honor and her siblings had grown up and thrived under the love and affection their parents had bestowed on them. Her brothers, every single one of them, excelled in one sport or another. As had her older sister. Her oldest brother had also played football in college and showed promise of being recruited by a pro team. He, like their father, hadn’t entered the draft and no one had questioned that decision. But then their father knew well that some decisions were simply too personal to be discussed. They just were.
But where his father had gone into coaching, an adequate substitute for not playing the sport he loved, her older brother had chosen law enforcement and was the sheriff of their county.
Her second oldest brother had chosen a professional career in sports. Unlike his father and older brother, he wasn’t a football fanatic. His entire childhood had been devoted to baseball and he was a natural. Even now he was playing with a pro team and had just signed another long-term lucrative contract before Honor had departed that last time.
The two younger brothers were both businessmen and partnered in several ventures. But that didn’t mean they didn’t carry the same abiding love—and gift—for sports.
Even her sister, the second to youngest and only other daughter in a sea of sons, was athletic and as graceful and fast as a gazelle. She too had gone into coaching after a brief stint playing professional softball in Italy after attending Kentucky State on a softball scholarship. Honor was very proud of her sister, who was the youngest head coach of the softball team in the history of the small university where she worked.
In the two years since her sister, Miranda, or Mandie as she’d been affectionately nicknamed, had taken over the program, the team had made postseason for the first time in the program’s history. Her job was definitely secure. The university had seen to that. And she was very happy there because she was already being heavily recruited by other larger, more prestigious universities with much larger programs and that had long-heralded legacies in college sports.