Stay If You Can

chapter Eight

Jenna knew something was different about Saturday's game the second she stepped onto the court and clocked the man in the gray jacket sitting three rows up from the usual crowd, clipboard in hand, watching warmups with the kind of stillness that had nothing to do with being a bored parent.

She didn't say anything to her teammates. She didn't need the pressure, and neither did they. She just filed it away *interesting, come back to that* and did what she always did.

She played like the court belonged to her.

Twenty-eight points. Eleven rebounds. A steal-and-fastbreak in the fourth quarter that had the home crowd on its feet, and a step-back three at the buzzer that she felt in her fingertips before it even left her hand, because some shots you just know.

She came off the court soaked in sweat and adrenaline, chest still heaving, and found her coach waiting at the tunnel with an expression Jenna had never actually seen on her before not proud, exactly. Something closer to careful.

"That man in the gray jacket," Coach Reyes said, "is a regional recruiter for the Northeast Elite program."

Jenna's stomach did something complicated.

"Okay," she said, careful, like the word might scare it off if she said it too loud.

"He wants to talk to you and your parents. Officially. Next week." Coach Reyes was smiling now, actually smiling, the careful expression cracking into something warmer. "Jenna. This is the kind of program that puts girls in front of Division One coaches. This is real."

Jenna had wanted this had wanted it in the specific, all-consuming way she'd wanted very few things in her life, ever since she was eleven years old and had first understood that a basketball court was the one place grief couldn't quite catch her. She'd pictured this exact moment more times than she'd ever admit to anyone.

She hadn't pictured how much she'd want, in the very same breath, to tell Eli first.

Not her parents, waiting in the stands with their careful, contained pride. Not her teammates, already shrieking and piling on her in the tunnel. Eli, specifically, because some instinct she didn't fully understand yet insisted that this news wasn't real, wasn't fully hers, until she'd watched his face do whatever it would do when she told him.

She texted him from the locker room, still in her jersey, hands shaking slightly from adrenaline and something else.

"Insane game. Insane news. Call me when you can, I need to tell you something."

No response by the time she was showered and dressed.

No response on the drive home, her mom chattering excitedly beside her about official visits and eligibility windows, half of which Jenna wasn't fully absorbing because she kept checking her phone at every red light.

No response by dinner. Jenna told herself it was fine he'd gone quiet before, he had a life, a family, things she didn't get full visibility into no matter how much he'd let her in on that bleacher. But the not-fine feeling sat in her chest anyway, low and persistent, the specific dread of a text left on read by someone who usually answered within the hour.

By nine, she gave up on subtlety and just called him.

Straight to voicemail.

By ten, worry had fully overtaken excitement, curdling the whole shining afternoon into something with a sharp edge. She thought about Friday night, the couch, the way he'd bolted like the building was on fire. She thought about the text he'd been staring at right before he'd left homecoming three weeks back, the one that had turned his whole face gray in the half second before he'd made an excuse to Paige and disappeared.

Jenna didn't know exactly what was happening in that house of his. He'd never let her all the way in, not really she'd caught fragments, the mother who left before six, the brother who didn't call, the specific exhausted competence of someone doing a job nobody had ever officially given him. But she knew enough to know that when Eli went dark like this, it wasn't nothing.

She almost drove over. Sat in her driveway for a full five minutes with the keys in her hand, running through what she'd even say if she showed up at his door uninvited during whatever crisis was currently swallowing him whole.

In the end she didn't go. Not because she didn't want to every loud, reckless part of her wanted to but because some quieter, harder-won part of her recognized that showing up uninvited, tonight, might read to him as exactly the kind of pressure she'd promised herself she wouldn't put on him. He needed to come to her. That had been the whole plan since the couch. Stay steady. Don't chase. Let him find his own way back.

It was, she thought bitterly, an incredibly difficult plan to stick to when the person you loved might be drowning three miles away and wouldn't pick up his phone.

*Loved.*

The word arrived in her head fully formed, uninvited, and she sat with it in the dark of her car for a long moment, more shaken by it than by anything that had happened on the court that afternoon.

She hadn't let herself say it, even privately, until right now.

It didn't feel like the word solved anything. If anything it made the not-knowing worse made the silence from his phone feel like a held breath she couldn't release until she knew he was okay.

She finally went inside around eleven, phone still silent, the biggest news of her athletic life sitting unshared and slightly deflated in her chest, replaced by a worry she had no way to act on.

Her phone buzzed at 11:47 p.m., just as she was finally drifting off.

One text. No explanation, no context, nothing about where he'd been all night.

"Sorry. Rough night. You said you had news?"

Jenna stared at the screen for a long moment, torn between relief that he was okay enough to text at all, and a colder, more clear-eyed thought pushing up underneath it one she wasn't ready to examine too closely yet.

*He didn't tell me what happened,* she thought. *He just came back and asked about my news, like his own night doesn't count as something worth sharing.*

She typed back three different responses and deleted all of them before finally settling on something simple, something true, something that left the door open without shoving him through it.

"I'm here whenever you're ready to actually tell me things. Not just ask about mine."

She didn't get a response to that one at all.