Her eyes were still on Alex. He seemed to be the only person in the world. He was talking to an official, but in the middle of his conversation he twisted his head to look up into the stands, as if he’d heard someone calling his name. He looked straight at her, and their eyes met for just one moment. Holly’s breath came faster, and her mouth opened to tell him, I love you, but then the whistle blew to start the game, and he had turned back to watch the action on the field.
It didn’t matter. There was plenty of time. Holly felt something that was new in her experience: a kind of serenity. She had looked into her heart and hadn’t run away from what she saw there, and in that one moment she felt free. She was free.
She took a deep breath and concentrated on what was happening on the football field. Her son was making his debut as the Wildcats’ starting quarterback, and she wasn’t going to miss a second of it, no matter how many revelations of true love fell out of the sky tonight.
“Isn’t this exciting?” Angela screamed in her ear over the shouting of the crowd.
“It is!” Holly shouted back, and the two women settled in to watch their sons and their teammates working together like a well-oiled machine, bonded together by trust and hard work and faith in themselves, all of it given to them by one man, Alex McKenna.
By the middle of the fourth quarter Tom Washington had rushed for over two hundred yards and a touchdown, and Will had completed sixteen of his twenty-three pass attempts, two of them for touchdowns. Holly cheered until her throat was hoarse, and when the last seconds of the game were ticking away, the Wildcats ahead by ten points, she was on her feet with the rest of the crowd when Will threw his last pass of the game, time ran out and the final whistle blew.
Then it happened. One of the Warriors’ defensive linebackers, who’d been frustrated all night long, came through the offensive line and smashed Will to the ground with a vicious hit, helmet to helmet. As the furious Wildcat players pulled him off their starting quarterback the crowd fell suddenly silent.
Will Stanton had failed to get up after the illegal play.
For one frozen moment Holly couldn’t move. Then she was crashing down through the stands, clumsily, falling the last few feet and getting up again and running, running, until she could kneel down at Will’s side.
“The ambulance is on its way,” Alex said, and she looked up to see him kneeling beside her, his eyes on Will’s face.
Before she could answer the trainers were there with a stretcher, and calm, professional hands were lifting Will onto it and covering him with a blanket. They started walking him off the field, Holly with them, her hand clutching one of Will’s in both her own, and by the time they made it to the parking lot the ambulance was there, lights flashing, and then Holly was riding inside it beside her son, her terror hardly lessened by the paramedic’s assurance that his heartbeat was strong and steady.
The next hour was a nightmare. They arrived at the hospital and they wouldn’t let her go in with Will, and nurses asked her things, and gave her papers to sign, and no one would tell her anything, even when she grabbed one doctor by the sleeve and begged her.
“Just sit down in the waiting room, Mrs. Stanton. As soon as we know anything we’ll tell you.”
“It’s Miss,” Holly whispered as she sank down onto a hard plastic chair. “Miss Stanton.”
Maybe if she was a Mrs. this wouldn’t have happened. If Will had a father. If she hadn’t let him play football. If she’d been paying more attention.
She’d been thinking about Alex, falling in love with Alex, and she’d let her guard down, and look what happened. When would she ever learn?
And then Alex was coming through the door, heading right for her, but at that moment the doctor came through another door.
“He’s fine,” the white coated woman said immediately, and Holly felt weak with relief, the tears she’d been holding back sliding down her cheeks. “He has a mild concussion. We took X-rays and did an MRI and all the usual tests, and he’s absolutely fine. We’ll keep him overnight for observation, but that’s just a precaution. He regained consciousness during the exam, but fell asleep a few minutes ago. That’s normal, too. You’re welcome to go in and see him, but he’ll probably still be asleep. It would be better not to wake him up.”
“I won’t,” Holly said. “I want to see him now.”
Will looked terribly young on the hospital bed, with an IV in his arm and some machine beeping on the table next to him. She stood there watching him, breathing when he breathed, for a long time. At some point a nurse came in and said they needed her at the front desk to fill out some more paperwork.