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Lottie shook her head. “I can’t.”
I sighed. A part of me had always known this was how this conversation would end as soon as I started it. Nothing had changed for either of us, so I was only rehashing the same things expecting a different result. Albert Einstein had a word for that.
“I don’t think you can either,” I told her. “Not until you can forgive the man who broke your heart first. Because I don’t think it was ever healed.”
The moment I turned to leave, I realized I had never really felt real pain until then. Not even with all my injuries. The kind of pain that physical therapy couldn’t fix was far worse because there was nothing but time that could heal it.
Chapter 31
Lottie
I woke up to an empty tub of ice cream from the night before still lying next to me in bed. The spoon I’d used stuck to my nightstand. It had been five days since Nolan had ripped my heart out. I had given him the day off on Monday, partly because he needed the rest for his body and partly because I wanted to avoid seeing him. At practice, I had reverted back to my avoidance tactics with his therapy. I’d left a sheet of exercises for him to do on his normal training bed and only stopped to ask him how he was feeling. Even that question had felt like the hardest sentence I’d ever had to say to someone.
Nolan looked as worse for wear as I did with unkempt hair and rumpled clothes. He seemed pained to watch me return to such professionalism with him, but I knew it hurt me more.
The rest of the week was much of the same: trying to avoid any unnecessary communication with him and sticking only to the interactions required for his performance.
Today’s practice was in the afternoon, and I was dreading it. It was the practice that Nolan and I normally spent the entire time together as we tried to get his body ready for the game, which was on a Saturday this week.
I’d been miserable this entire week. It was the first time in my life that I hadn’t felt excited to go to work. The moment that I decided to give Nolan a chance, I gave him a piece of my heart, which now felt broken. I didn’t know exactly how I felt about him—all I knew was that I really loved being around him and I’dstarted to consider him one of the more important people in my life. That chance I’d taken on him turned out to hurt me more than anything.
“I come bearing gifts,” my sister’s voice rang out in my apartment. She walked into my bedroom with two large coffees in her hands.
“Oh, yes,” I breathed, reaching out to grab it from her.
Olivia eyed the spoon and empty ice cream tub with a raised eyebrow. “Not a good week, huh?”
“It could be better,” I admitted as I took my first sips of caffeine for the day.
My sister pulled the covers back on the other side of my bed and slid in next to me. “Want to talk about it?”
It felt like all the times that I had done the same to her while she was in middle school, feeling terrible after being bullied at school. Except now the roles were reversed and I was the one needing the advice and comfort this time.
“Does it have anything to do with that interview Nolan did with Harper Nelson?” Olivia asked.
Quiet stretched out between us as I figured out how I wanted to navigate this conversation with her. Because neither of us had truly discussed the trauma we had courtesy of our father.
“When he told me he was considering coming back for another year, I felt like I was twelve years old again, doing everything I could to get our dad’s attention, but still always playing second fiddle to what he wanted,” I told her.
Olivia sat quietly for a moment before she responded. “Does Nolan know about Dad?”
I cringed every time Olivia called our father “Dad”. I’d stopped calling him that the moment he forced me to play the role as parent for him. But I’d made sure to protect Olivia the best Icould so that she never had to see all the ugliness our father truly had.
“Pieces of the story.” I remembered seeing our father in the grocery store those weeks before with Nolan on my yes day. “I saw him the other day.”
“Who?”
“Our father,” I told her. I watched her freeze, and her eyes widen, like the reaction I had when I saw him that day.
“When?” Olivia asked. Her voice had dropped down to a whisper. Neither she nor I had seen him since her high school graduation where he’d left halfway through.
“At a grocery store on my yes day.”
Hurt flickered through Olivia’s eyes for a split second when she realized how many weeks ago this was.
“I didn’t talk to him. I bolted out of the aisle I saw him in and dragged Nolan with me before he could see us.”
“I never realized how badly our childhood had affected you or how much you’d done to make sure I didn’t have to take the brunt of it like you did.” My sister reached her free hand down to squeeze mine. “I know where he lives.”
