Page 85 of Just One More Thing

“I don’t know how to love halfway.”

The channel marker blinks again.

One.

Pause.

One.

Hank shifts and rests his chin on Willard’s shoe. Willard scratches behind his ear without looking down.

“She left sophomore year,” I say quietly. No context needed. Willard knows. Willard has always known. “I was twenty-one. Thought that was the worst thing that would ever happen to me.” I buy myself a second before I say it. “Took about seven years to learn I was wrong.”

The accident.

A preseason game. I was still in the locker room when my phone started vibrating across the bench. It was Charlie. He never called during a game. He called five times in a row.

I knew before I picked up.

Willard was one of the first people I saw when I walked into The Knuckle at two in the morning because I didn’t know where else to go. He didn’t ask questions. He just sat with me until the sun came up and the town woke around us and life kept moving the way it always does even when you’re certain it shouldn’t.

“The shoulder,” I say after a while.

Willard waits.

“I could’ve rehabbed it. People come back from worse. My surgeon gave me a whole plan. He had charts. Timelines. Projections.” I lean back and look up through the oak branches.

“I stood in his office and listened to every word he said and pictured putting that jersey back on and walking into a stadium and I couldn’t?—“

I stop. Scrub a hand down my face and start again. “And I couldn’t keep walking out there without looking for them in the stands.”

It wasn’t the pain. It wasn’t fear.

It was the empty space where they would’ve been.

“I just couldn’t find the reason anymore,” I finish.

“You came home,” Willard says.

“I came home.”

The dock lights along The Knuckle reflect in the water, long gold streaks that ripple and reform. My granddad built that dock. My dad extended it. I’ve repaired it three times since I came back. There’s something in that continuity that steadies me on the days when nothing else does.

“She doesn’t know,” I say. “About any of it.”

“No,” Willard agrees. “She doesn’t.”

“You think I should tell her.”

“I think,” he says slowly, “the people worth keeping are the ones who don’t flinch when you hand them the hard parts.”

I think about Mo’s face in the kitchen when we almost kissed. On the boat when I told her I was barely holding it together. Under the meteor shower with her fingers laced through mine.

She didn’t flinch.

“She stayed,” I say.

Willard nods. He tosses another peanut. Still no Chip. The peanut disappears into the grass. “My wife used to say love isn’t the feeling,” he says. “It’s the decision you keep making when the feeling gets complicated.”