Chapter 110 CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TEN

Chapter 110 CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TEN
 ASHER

The scoreboard already said 2–0.
We are winning
Bronx Heights looked tired, stretched thin across their own half, and every time we pushed forward the crowd noise lifted like it expected another goal. On any other day, I would have fed off that. On any other day, the math alone would have been enough to sharpen me.
If we held this, and Silverbrook slipped, we went top.
We were already above them on the table by a thread. One clean result. One responsible performance. That was all it would take to turn the season’s pressure into something that looked like control.
I should have been glad.
I wasn’t.
My head was somewhere else entirely.
“Asher!”
Blake’s voice cut through the noise from midfield. The ball came hard and clean toward my feet, a driven pass that deserved better than what I was about to give it. I took it on the half-turn, body angled toward goal, a Bronx Heights defender closing fast on my right. For a second the lane opened… not wide, but enough. I could see the keeper’s positioning, the gap just inside the far post, the exact kind of finish I had made a hundred times in better moods.
I should have struck it early.
Instead I took one touch too many.
The ball sat under my foot a fraction longer than it should have, and that was all the defender needed. He lunged. I tried to shove it through anyway, a forced, ugly contact that sent the shot scraping wide of the post with no real conviction behind it. The crowd’s rising sound collapsed into a collective groan.
“Whitlock!” Coach barked from the sideline. “Decide!”
I jogged back into shape without answering.
The next twenty minutes were worse.
A simple hold-up play turned into a lost duel because I checked my shoulder late. A recovery run I usually made on instinct came half a second delayed. When Mason switched play out wide and the ball came back into the corridor for me to attack, I misread the bounce and let it skip past my instep into touch. None of it was catastrophic on its own. Together, it became impossible to ignore.
Bronx Heights smelled blood in the smallest ways. They started pressing me harder. Talking more. One of their center-backs clipped my heels and muttered something about the golden boy looking heavy. I barely heard him. My frustration had nowhere useful to go, so it sat in my limbs and made them clumsy.
In the sixty-third minute, I overhit a return ball to Blake so badly it became a turnover.
That was the end of it.
Coach didn’t even wait for the next stoppage to finish forming the decision on his face. His voice cut across the pitch.
“Whitlock! Off!”
For a second I stayed where I was, breathing hard, sweat cooling too fast along my spine. Then I forced my legs to move. The walk to the sideline felt longer than it should have. I slapped hands with the substitute coming on, ignored the pointed look from Coach, and dropped onto the bench with my jaw locked so tight it ached.
From there, I watched the rest of the match like a spectator in my own season.
We still won.
Dylan finished a cutback in the seventy-first. Mason nearly added another before the final whistle. The scoreboard settled on 3–0, clean and emphatic, the kind of result that should have left the locker room loud with relief.
Around me, it did.
Players clapped shoulders, shouted about Silverbrook’s later kickoff, about what the table might look like by nightfall. Someone told me good win anyway. Someone else said every team had off nights.
I peeled off my shirt, dragged a towel over my face, and said nothing.
Because the win was real.
And so was the fact that I had been a liability inside it.
“Are you good?” Mason asked, dropping onto the bench beside me as the locker room noise swelled around us.
Landon leaned against the opposite row of lockers, still unwrapping the tape from his wrists. “Yeah. You looked off out there.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
Mason raised an eyebrow. “That the best you’ve got?”
“I said I’m fine.”
“You got subbed off,” Landon pointed out, not unkindly. “You don’t get subbed off.”
“Apparently I do.”
Mason studied me for another second, clearly unconvinced, then exhaled and let it go with a shrug. “Alright. Brooding champion of the year. Noted.”
Landon’s mouth twitched. “We should get him a trophy. Least improved mood.”
“I’d dominate that category,” Mason said. “No contest.”
“Please. You cried when they changed the vending machine protein bars.”
“Those bars were superior and you know it.”
The conversation slid sideways into familiar nonsense after that…complaints about the referee’s imaginary blind spot. I let their voices fill the space around me without offering much back. Easier that way. Safer than giving them anything real to dig into.
Eventually the locker room thinned.
We moved with the rest of the stragglers toward the exit, the three of us falling into step out of habit more than planning.
Outside, the evening air was cooler against still-damp skin. The parking lot lights had already flickered on, washing the cars in pale gold.
Landon spun his keys once around his finger. “Don’t go home and stare at a wall.”
“No promises,” I said.
Mason clapped my shoulder once. “Text if you need anything. Or don’t. We’ll pretend you’re emotionally stable either way.”
“Appreciate the support.”
“You should.”
They split off toward their cars, still tossing comments back and forth across the asphalt until car doors shut and engines turned over. I unlocked mine, dropped into the driver’s seat, and sat there for a moment with my hands on the wheel, the quiet rushing in fast now that there was nothing left to drown it out.

I picked up my phone before I could talk myself out of it.
Oliver’s message was still sitting there, unanswered since earlier that afternoon.
Oliver: “Mom’s sick. Really sick this time. Please come home. Please”.
I stared at the screen until the words stopped looking like language and started looking like pressure.
I hadn’t replied.
I didn’t know what to say.
I just can’t.
The thought came sharp and immediate, followed by a wave of heat up the back of my neck. My chest tightened like someone had reached inside and closed a fist around everything I kept carefully arranged. The parking lot outside the windshield blurred. For a second the car felt too small, the air too thin.
I can’t.
I can’t go back there.
I can’t open that door again.
My pulse climbed hard enough that I had to tip my head back against the seat and force air in through my nose. One breath. Then another. It barely helped. Because the second I let the message fully land, memory surged up with it…violent, uninvited, and far too clear.
Suddenly I wasn’t in the car anymore.

I was eight again, bursting through the front door of our old house with my backpack half-unzipped and my whole body buzzing.
Dad had been gone a week for work. Traveled to Florida. I had spent the entire drive home rehearsing how I was going to break the news to mom. 
I had been made lead.
Lead.
The music recital wasn’t just another line on a program anymore. My name would be the one people looked for. The piece everyone waited through the other performances to hear. 
I wanted her face to light up.
I wanted her to say she was proud before I even finished the sentence.
“Mom!” I called, toeing off my shoes in the entryway. “Mom, guess what!”
The house answered with silence.
No kitchen noise. No distant reply from upstairs. Afternoon light cut through the living room windows in pale strips, catching dust in the air. For a second I thought maybe she was out. Then I heard it… a soft sound from the second floor. 
She was home.
I took the stairs two at a time, grin already pulling wide across my face, backpack bouncing against my spine. In my head the moment was already perfect. I would push the door open. She would turn around. I would tell her. She would hug me too hard and make a big deal out of it the way she sometimes still did when she remembered to.
I didn’t knock.
I pushed their bedroom door open, the words already leaving my mouth.
“Mom, guess what—”
The rest died instantly.
There was a man on the bed.
Not a stranger.
That was the part my brain struggled with first, as if recognition itself were a betrayal. I knew his face. I had seen it at dinners. At the doorway with a bottle of wine in his hand. At Dad’s birthday the year before. One of Dad’s friends. One of the men who was supposed to belong to the safe category of people who came into our house.
Mom scrambled off the bed so fast the sheet dragged with her. Her hair was messy. Her mouth opened around my name and nothing useful came out. The man swore under his breath and turned away, grabbing for clothes with a panic that made him look smaller than I had ever seen him.
“Ash—” Mom started.
I backed up.
My shoulder hit the doorframe. The backpack strap slid down my arm. All the excitement that had carried me up the stairs curdled so fast it left me hollow.
“I—” My voice sounded unreal in my own ears. “I got lead.”
It was a stupid thing to say. Irrelevant. Pathetic, almost. But it was the only sentence still left in my mouth, the news I had been holding carefully all the way home like something breakable.
Mom’s face crumpled. “Baby—”
I didn’t wait for the rest.
I turned and went down the hall so fast the walls blurred. Behind me I heard her moving, calling my name, the low urgent voice of the man saying something I did not want to hear. None of it slowed me down. I locked myself in my room with shaking fingers and sat on the edge of the bed with my hands limp between my knees, staring at the floor until the wood grain stopped making sense.
She knocked.
Then knocked again.
Then said my name through the door in a voice so soft it made everything worse.
I didn’t answer.

The memory released as violently as it had taken me.
I sucked in a breath and found myself back in the driver’s seat, phone still clenched in my hand, Oliver’s message still glowing on the screen. Sweat had gathered along my hairline. My pulse was still too high.
Please come home.
I locked the phone and dropped it onto the passenger seat like it had burned me.
Then I gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared out at the darkening parking lot until the present, reluctantly, stayed put.