on you.
In December, I thought a potential draft acceptance speech was the scariest thing I’d have to do in the coming year.
Until this. This is hell. I’m supposed to talk to all these people about a man I loved like he was my own brother. A guy who was closer to family to me than anyone else in my life. I’m supposed to talk about the man whose girl I stole and whose life I took.
Fuck. It’s my very worst crime, my ugliest sin, and I can’t even remember it. I keep waiting for flashes of being in the car, the screeching tires. But I get nothing.
The whole congregation stares at me, waiting for me to speak. I let them wait. I need a goddamn minute.
“Arrow?” Chris asks from the front row. “You okay, man?”
I nod. I need to tell Mia.
How can I speak about Brogan when that’s all I can think on repeat? I need to tell Mia. Mia needs to hear it from me. I have to figure out how I can do that without fucking up Coach’s life, how I can tell her the truth without her going to the authorities. If it were just me, it would already be done. I’d be serving my time, and Mia would be hating me as she should. But Coach doesn’t deserve to be punished when all he was doing was trying to protect me.
I have to tell her.
Women shift in their seats, and men clear their throats, filling in the silence as they wait.
“We’re all here to say goodbye to Brogan,” I say, “but most of us don’t have a clue how to do that. Putting a man like Brogan in the earth before his life had really begun feels like burying a dream. It feels like choosing the nightmare instead. It feels like staying in the cave, cold and shivering, and knowing that all you have to do to feel the sun is walk outside. So many of us have spent the weeks leading up to this moment talking to Brogan and holding his hand and lying to ourselves that the sun was waiting out there for us. That we could wake up from the nightmare at any minute.”
Lifting my eyes, I’m greeted with a sea of my teammates in black suits. These are the men who show no fear on the field, but right now their faces show all the fear I’m feeling. I clear my throat and turn to look at Brogan—maybe the only guy here who doesn’t look half terrified.
Looking at him helps me go on. “Part of saying goodbye, I’m learning, is accepting that there is no choice. We don’t get to choose the sunlight over the cold inside the cave. We don’t get to choose the dream over the nightmare. Part of saying goodbye is accepting there are things in this world that are out of our control.”
A sob rises from the crowd. Trish is curled into Coach’s chest, and he’s stroking her hair. Mia’s sitting between Chris and Mason, her face pale, her cheeks dry. She’s not even holding a tissue.
“Someone told me that faith isn’t about trying to understand why God did what He did. It isn’t about trying to make sense of His plan for us. It’s simply the acceptance that some things are out of our control and that’s okay. Maybe that’s why Brogan gave us time. He took the slow way out of this world, and we had months to say our goodbyes. Or maybe he just didn’t want to let go. This is a guy who was so full of life and so full of love. He and I were like brothers before I even understood what that meant. We liked all the same things. The same teams, the same position in football . . . the same girls.”
That gets a few laughs, and I smile.
“I’m an only child—or was until a couple of months ago. Brogan taught me what family is. Family is letting someone make a mistake, letting them hurt you without it changing how you feel about them.”
In front of me, Chris meets my gaze and nods. Two rows back, Trish pulls out of her father’s arms and wipes her eyes.
“He wasn’t perfect. He had a temper. Made rash decisions. Had a selfish streak. More or less, he was the average college guy when it came to his faults. But he didn’t expect perfection from anyone else. It made him so easy to love.