Nash Brothers Box Set - Carrie Aarons Page 0,146

laughter. “What I’m saying is, soon, it will be time for me to retire.”

“I didn’t realize you were thinking about it. Honestly, I thought you’d die in that dugout.”

Coach Hankins chuckles. “Many people do, too. But nah. Marjorie is bugging me, says we need to spend some of our retirement together. And my bones are old, my heart is tired. I love coaching, but I just don’t have the energy anymore. I have to find someone to fill my shoes.”

I dust his neck off, unsuspecting when he hits me with his next choice of words.

“And looking in this mirror right now, I think you might be the best man for the job.”

I nearly drop the razor I’m about to trim the last uneven bit of his hairline with. “Wh … what?”

Coach laughs, a booming, jubilant sound coming from deep in his throat. “Don’t swallow your tongue now, boy. And don’t act so surprised. I’m in here a week early … I think you’re losing track of time.”

Now that he says it … I realize he’s right. “You came in here to ask me to … what exactly?”

“To become the coach of the Fawn Hill High School varsity baseball team.” He smirks.

The idea gets my heart thumping, and my mouth going dry. Coach removes his own cape, standing from the chair to check his new do out in the mirror.

“Great job, kid.” He fishes in his wallet, gives me the usual fifteen dollars for the cut, and the fifteen-dollar tip.

I’ve told him a hundred times to stop tipping the same amount that I charge for the cut, that no one tips a hundred percent. He just smiles and whistles as he walks out, usually.

But this time, he turns to me. “I’ll let you think about it. But I’d like to hang up my cleats sooner rather than later. Let me know, Bowen.”

And then he leaves.

Jesus. That big decision just turned into a fucking enormous decision.

35

Lily

It takes me an entire day to pull myself out of bed.

That may not seem like much, but for me, it’s monumental. Never in my life have I missed a day of work due to personal issues. I don’t call out. I don’t shuck responsibilities, or leave my friends hanging, or silence calls from my mother.

But ever since Bowen revealed the secret that made my world implode, all the pieces of my life have fallen by the wayside. When I left his house, I came straight home, crawled into bed, and haven’t been out of it since.

I never understood how depression or bone-deep sadness can affect a person so brutally. You hear those stories or watch the recounting of someone who went through it and think: There is no way I’d ever be so sad that my body would simply shut down.

But it happens. It’s like the body and mind’s own way of doing damage control. Simply shutting off, not rebooting, not allowing you to explore a conscious state because if you do … the pain you’ll experience is too great to handle.

I thought sleep would evade me that I’d be crying into my pillow for hours on end. But the minute I pulled the comforter over me, the world went dark. Sleep consumed me, I’d wake for a hazy second and then be pulled back under.

When I finally surface long enough to check my cell on my nightstand, I realize I’ve been out for almost twenty-four hours. It’s five p.m. the next day, and I have approximately seventy missed calls from Bowen, more texts, and thirty unread emails from work. Thank God I’d had the forethought to email my part-time employee to cover me before I went into my sleep coma.

That word choice is ironic, considering I’d been unconscious at the time Bowen was threatened to leave me … and actually listened.

I couldn’t believe it. Even as the truth rattles around in my brain now, the one thing I’d desperately wanted to know in the last ten years, I still don’t believe it.

Our fathers. The actual men who had helped to create us … wanted to keep us apart.

My father, the one who’d told me he loved me and wanted to see me succeed since the day I’d been born, had threatened and taken away the love of my life. He’d promised to expose the dirtiest, most vulgar part of our accident … the reason why I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. A father, not to mention a stranger, should never hold that kind of information over