Blindside

Four: Self-Made

Levi

Elena Ashford still lived in the same two-bedroom rental on Fenwick Street that she'd raised Levi in, and no amount of arguing, bribing, or quietly wiring money into an account she pretended not to check had managed to move her one block closer to anywhere nicer. Levi had given up trying around his second pro season. Some battles weren't winnable, and his mother's stubbornness was a genetic inheritance he recognized a little too well to fight fair against.

"You look terrible," was her greeting, which from Elena Ashford was a love language. She was already reaching for the ice pack in the freezer before he'd gotten his shoes off, because of course she'd watched the game, because of course she'd seen the hit, because there had never been a single night in Levi's entire career that his mother hadn't been watching, usually from the same secondhand recliner with the volume turned too loud for the walls of that apartment.

"I'm fine, Ma."

"You're limping."

"I'm fine and limping. Both things can be true."

She made him sit anyway, and iced the ribs herself like he was still nine years old and this was a Little League scrape instead of a hit that had made three different injury-report sites, and Levi let her, because some things you didn't fight even when you could win them.

She'd been doing this exact routine since he was seven years old and broke his wrist falling out of the Fenwick Street sycamore trying to impress a kid named Marcus — the same Marcus who, twenty years and one career change later, now called Levi with bad news for a living. Elena Ashford had iced approximately every injury Levi had ever sustained, on a teacher's salary, in an apartment with a landlord who took his time about the heat, and had never once, in twenty-four years, made Levi feel like any of it was a burden.

The apartment hadn't changed much in twenty years. Same water stain on the kitchen ceiling shaped, depending on the day, like either a rabbit or a very committed cloud. Same photos layered under magnets on the fridge, decades of them, Levi at every age from toothless to captain — and not one single photo, in all those years, of anyone who might have been a father. He'd noticed the absence around age seven and asked about it maybe a dozen times total in the seventeen years since, which was, by his own count, eleven more times than it had ever gotten him a real answer.

He'd brought paperwork tonight — the team wanted updated emergency contact and family medical history on file before the next round of physicals, standard stuff, the kind of form Levi usually filled out on autopilot. He got as far as the line asking for paternal medical history before he stopped, like he stopped every single time, and slid the clipboard across the kitchen table toward his mother without a word.

She looked at it a beat too long before she picked up the pen.

Unknown, she wrote, same as always, in the same neat teacher's handwriting she used for everything, and Levi watched her do it and felt the thing he always felt and had never quite found the right word for. Not anger, exactly. Something closer to standing at the edge of a room he wasn't allowed into, close enough to hear the party but not the words.

He'd tried actual investigation a few times over the years — a genealogy site in college that dead-ended fast, a half-serious conversation with a teammate whose cousin did private investigation work that he'd talked himself out of before it went anywhere. Every time, it came back to the same math: whatever his mother was protecting him from, or protecting herself from, she'd built an entire quiet, careful life around not answering it, and Levi had never quite been willing to be the one to knock that down.

"You could just tell me it's none of my business," he said, mostly joking. "Would save us both the pen."

"It's not that it's none of your business, baby." She didn't look up from the form. "It's that some men don't get to be part of the story. Doesn't mean there's a hole in you where he should be. Means I made sure there wasn't one."

It was, Levi realized, not actually an answer. It had just never occurred to him, in twenty-four years, to notice that — because she said it with so much certainty that it had always felt like one.

He let it go, same as always, because pushing had never once worked and because some nights it was easier to let his mother have her careful, practiced peace than to go chasing down a truth that had survived this long without him. She made him take leftovers home in three separate containers he didn't need. She stood in the doorway in her robe, arms crossed against the cold, until his car was all the way down the block, same as she'd done since the day he got his license.

He was almost to the car when his agent called.

"Two things," Marcus said, without preamble, the way he always started calls that were about to ruin Levi's night. "One, your quote about Draven is doing so many numbers the league office called me personally, so — good job, I guess, we're leaning into it. Two, there's a league charity thing in two weeks. Black tie, mandatory for captains, very photographed." A pause — the one Marcus always used right before the part he already knew Levi wouldn't like. "Ironbay's captain is confirmed to attend."

"You could just tell him you're busy," Marcus offered, not very convincingly. "I could probably get you out of it. Probably."

"No. If I skip it, it's a story. If I show up and I'm normal about it, it's one photo and it's over by Thursday." Levi said it with more confidence than he felt.

Levi stood in his mother's driveway a moment, phone against his ear, staring up at a sky that hadn't quite decided if it wanted to rain.

"Great," he said. "Can't wait."

He meant it, mostly, as a lie. He would spend an embarrassing amount of the next two weeks discovering exactly how much of one it actually was.