Page 169 of Offside

I pulled her closer.

The woman beside me who had walked into my life in September and stayed there.

I pressed my lips to her hair.

“Second chances,” I said.

She looked up at me. “What?”

“That’s what this is. All of it.” I gestured at the yard, the sky, the city beyond. “Phoenix. The team. Us.” I paused. “I came here not knowing what I’d find. Turns out it was everything I didn’t know I was looking for.”

She held it for a moment. Then she turned her face into my shoulder and I felt her smile against me.

“Alltid din,” she said. Quietly. In Swedish. Getting the pronunciation mostly right.

I went still.

She’d been practicing. I didn’t know when, didn’t know how long she’d been sitting with those two words and teaching herself how to say them, but she had, and she’d just said them to me in the dark, simply, like it was something she’d decided.

I held her tighter than I probably needed to.

“Yeah,” I said, against her hair. My voice came out lower than I’d intended. “Alltid.”

Somewhere between April and tonight she’d taken those two words and learned how to say them—-not just the spelling, the actual sound of them, the vowels that had no equivalent in English. She’d said them quietly, and I’d felt her effort move through my chest.

She’d decided to give me that.

It was just us and the desert and the stars coming out slow above the mountain line.

I was going to spend the rest of my life with her if she’d let me.

I’d gone to Tom in person on a Sunday afternoon, the week after the season ended. Linda was visiting her sister in Tucson. Tom poured two glasses of water and sat down across from me and waited.

I said it. All of it. What she meant to me, what I wanted, what I was asking for.

Tom was quiet for a long moment after. He turned his glass in both hands the way Maren turned her coffee mug when she was thinking something through.

Then he looked at me and said yes. Simply, like it had never been in question. And then, quieter, “I was hoping you’d ask.”

I took Griffin to the jewelry store without explanation. He figured it out in the parking lot, looked at me once, and walked in.

Dark wood cases, individual lighting on each piece, a jeweler who appeared from somewhere and didn’t hover. Griffin and I moved down the cases slowly. He had his hands in his pockets. I had one of Maren’s rings in mine—-the thin gold band she kept on her right hand. You bring a ring you already own so the jeweler can size the new one to match. I’d lifted it off her dresser three days ago and had been carrying it ever since.

“Is that her ring?” Griffin asked.

“Yeah.”

“She leave that at your place?”

“She leaves a lot of things at my place.” I smirked at him, I mean how could I not? This was great.

Griffin pressed his lips together and turned to look very carefully at a display case that had nothing to do with what we were shopping for. “Okay,” he said. “Moving on.”

I found it in the third case. Six carats, round solitaire, platinum band. I stopped.

Griffin leaned over the case and furrowed his brows. “You can see that from space,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the point. I want her to look down at her hand for the rest of her life and know I was serious about her from the day I met her.”