Coach Rogers gave a little shake of his head. “Lena, you’re a valuable member of the team. We can—”
“Thank you for saying that.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the next as a group of students skirted around us. “And I really appreciate all the opportunity you’ve given me, but I’m going to miss so many games and practices. I’m going to be completely out of it and it’s for the best.”
“If your arm comes out of that cast by the end of the month, you have all of October to play and any tournaments we might make it to,” Coach reasoned. “You still have a chance to catch the eye of a scout. Remember how we talked about scholarships?”
“Megan would’ve gotten a scholarship,” I said before I could stop myself. “She wouldn’t need it, but she would’ve gotten one. Not me.”
Surprise registered across his face. “You have a good chance—”
“It’s not what I want to do anymore,” I cut in, taking a step back. Over his shoulder, I saw Sebastian approaching. I drew in a shallow breath. “I’m sorry.” I stepped around him. “I’ve got to catch my ride.”
Coach Rogers turned. “I think you’re making a mistake.”
If so, then I’d just tack that right next to the last one I made.
“If you change your mind, you come see me,” he said. “We can make it right.”
I wasn’t going to change my mind, but I nodded and walked to where Sebastian was waiting.
Sebastian glanced down the hall, his gaze lingering on where Coach had been standing. “Everything good?”
“Yeah. Of course,” I said, letting him take my backpack from me. “I’m ready to go.”
His gaze flickered to mine and I thought for a moment he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. As we walked down the hall in silence, I couldn’t shake what Coach Rogers had said.
The twisting motion in my stomach increased. Had I done the right thing? I must have, because it was already too late if I hadn’t.
*
I sat at the kitchen table that night, pushing peas around on my plate with my fork. I couldn’t believe Mom still put them on my plate like I was five and thought I was actually going to eat them.
Mom had asked about my session with Dr. Perry, and I’d given her the general gist of what was going on. She then asked about Abbi and Dary, since she hadn’t seen Abbi in a while. I’d lied, claiming Abbi was busy. Mom didn’t ask about Sebastian, which for some reason made me think that she knew full well about his late-night visits but for whatever reason wasn’t saying anything.
“Lori was thinking about coming home this weekend,” Mom said, cutting into her slice of the meat loaf she’d had in the Crock-Pot all day.
“Really?” I stabbed my fork into the meat, hungry but not. “That’s a lot of traveling for her.”
“It is, but she wants to see you.” Mom looked at me from across the table. “She’s been worried.”
A piece of my meat loaf turned to dust in my throat. “Is Dad still around?”
Mom stiffened just the slightest. “He had to get back to Seattle. I do believe he tried to call you and see you before he left.”
I shrugged one shoulder. The funny thing about my dad? Nothing was stopping him from seeing me if he really wanted to. Yeah, I didn’t answer his calls, but he could’ve come over. Mom would let him. So he could’ve seen me. I also recognized how backward it was that I was angry that he didn’t try hard enough to see me when I didn’t want to see him.
I was a hot mess.
“He’s going to come back.” Mom placed her glass back down. “Over Thanksgiving. We’re going to have a dinner—”
“Like we’re one big happy family?” I replied, admittedly snottily.
“Lena.” Mom sighed, laying her fork down. “He is your father. He is a good man, and I understand that you have...unresolved issues with him, but he is, at the end of the day, your dad.”
“A good man?” I couldn’t believe my mom was defending him. “He left you—left us—because he couldn’t deal with anything. Like, legit, anything.”
“Honey.” Mom shook her head as she put her arm on the table. “It was more than his business failing and us having money issues. Way more than that. I loved your father. Part of me still does and probably always will.”
Pressing my lips together, my gaze flipped to the ceiling. Knowing what I always suspected, that Mom still loved him, just ticked me off more.
“There’s something you need to understand about me and your father,” she said, drawing in a shallow breath. “Your father—Alan—he simply didn’t love me as much as I loved him,” she said, dropping that bomb like she’d said nothing.
I gaped at her.
She focused on her plate, exhaling heavily. “I think—no, I know—I’ve always known that. All these years, he loved me. He genuinely cared about me, but it wasn’t enough. Alan tried, he really did, and I’m not making excuses for him, but how he felt was just not enough.”
I stared at her, unsure of what to say, because I...I had never heard any of this before.
“We married young, as soon as we found out I was pregnant with Lori. That is what people did back then.” Then she dropped another bomb. “Your father didn’t want to leave, Lena. He saw me—saw us—as his responsibility, and while you two were his responsibility, I wasn’t. I wanted to be his equal and his partner, not his responsibility.”
“What?” I whispered, nearly dropping my fork.
“I asked him to leave. It was me who initiated the separation.” Her smile was sad, a little bitter. “I thought that confronting what I always knew, that what he felt wasn’t enough, and asking him to leave might make him feel the way I did.” Her laugh was like glass cracking. “I may be a grown woman, Lena, but every so often, we still believe in fairy tales. Asking him to leave was the last chance. That maybe he’d—”
“Wake up and fall in love with you?” I asked, voice pitched. Had she really believed that? I briefly squeezed my eyes shut. Had she thought that by asking him to leave, she’d get her own happily-ever-after like in a book?
Mom nodded. “I did. And looking back, there was a tiny part of me that knew you couldn’t scare someone into loving you more. That’s not how things work.”
All I could do was sit there.
“I love him—unconditionally. But when I could no longer lie to myself and I could no longer let him lie to himself, I knew the marriage was over.”
I sat back in the chair, hands falling into my lap. “Why...why didn’t you tell us any of this?”
That faint, sad smile faded. “Pride? Embarrassment? When we divorced, you were still too young for that kind of conversation. So was Lori, even though she was a teenager. It’s not something easy to talk about, to admit to your young daughters that you stayed with a man who didn’t love you like he should’ve.”