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Chapter 6: Spencer Nash
The Only Constant in the Turbulence
Three and a Half Months Before the Wedding
I sit in my car and stare out the windshield at the practice facility.
Or, I guess…my former practice facility.
The place that’s been home for the last seven years.
Seven seasons.
The only home I’ve had during my tenure as a professional football player.
The news hasn’t quite sunk in yet, but that feeling I got at the end of our last game of the season was right on the money.
It was my last home game at that stadium.
Coach just said the dreaded words nobody in the prime of their career on a team they love wants to hear. “We’ve decided to release you.”
Coach was everything he needed to be. Supportive, sympathetic, sorry.
But the three S words don’t keep me on the team.
He told me they wouldn’t make the information public for another few weeks. It’ll give me time to digest it before it’s public.
A mix of emotions plows into me, but disbelief seems to grab hold of the reins the tightest.
It’ll sink in later. Tomorrow, or the next day, or…
In April, when voluntary minicamp starts, and I have to report to work on a new team—if anybody picks me up since I’m a free agent now.
Fuck. Fuck!
It feels like my carefully planned life is falling apart. Like I can’t control anything at all anymore.
I thought I could. I thought I had my path all figured out. I’d play three more years an hour away from the woman I planned to marry. I’d retire to the vineyard.
Everything feels like it’s been thrown into a tailspin lately, and not just because of this news. The feelings for my fiancée have shifted to be less than positive. The little voice in the back of my head keeps asking me why I’m with her at all.
Because it was part of the fucking plan, and it feels like it’s the only part of the plan I can still safely hold onto. We’re so different, and that just seems to become more and more evident to me the longer I’m with her. But as soon as I’m convinced I should just end it, she manages to put it off or find a way to convince me to stay with her.
And now…she feels like the only constant in all this turbulence.
So do I end it with her and start completely fresh when I find my new team? Or do I hold onto the one constant that I’ve had over the last two years?
I’m very much a creature of routine, and this is throwing it all out of whack for me. But maybe that’s what I needed. I got stuck, and this change that’s being forced upon me is forcing me out of my comfort zone toward something different.
I’ve never been a big believer in the fate of everything happening for a reason. My logical brain strives to find the cause-and-effect relationship in every aspect of life, and I get it. Getting rid of me opens up a hell of a lot of money to pay someone else. But maybe fate is at work here, too.
And right now, fate is telling me to let Amelia go and to move on with my life.
I’m not looking forward to the conversation, but it needs to happen.
Now.
I shift my sleek black Audi into drive and head toward my soon-to-be ex-fiancée’s house. I pull onto the street leading there, but the vineyard is a huge complex comprised of over eighty acres. There’s the mansion with the offices, tasting room, restaurant, and gift shop. There’s the wedding venue, the production facility, the barn, the original estate where Amelia’s grandmother, dad, and uncle— Maggie, Steve, and Jimmy—live, and five three-bedroom bungalows near the office, one of which Amelia lives in.
