Page 117 of Cherry Picking

Her face fills most of my screen because she sits too close to the camera, the same as always. Behind her, there’s a bookshelf and an enormous monstera. My laptop is propped against a stack of cookbooks on the counter.

“You look tired,” Isabelle says.

“It’s game day.”

“Mm. It’s a different tired than usual.” She takes a sip from a mug with a scotty dog on it. “Talk to me.”

“Tonight, we either make playoffs or the season ends. Depends on us and depends on Ottawa.”

She gives me a warm smile. “Is that what you’d like to talk about today?”

“Not really.” She waits, and I clear my throat. “I want Evie to come to the game tonight. As you know, I’ve been texting her for five weeks. She hasn’t answered once. Not a single word.”

“Does she want you to stop?”

“I asked her. She didn’t say yes.” I drag a hand over my jaw. “So I keep going. Every couple days. I tell her we won, or we lost, or some random bit of news. I send her a picture of something I think she might like. I try not to ask her for anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because I just want her to know I’m present,” I answer, searching for the right words. “That’s where I failed so completely with Ophelia. Whenever a crisis popped up, I’d grab whatever quick fix could wrap it up cleanly. But now I know it wasn’t what she really needed. I’m trying something else with Evie. I just want her to know where I stand and give her the space to decide what she wants to do with that.”

“That’s a real change.” She tilts her head. “I want to ask you something, though. Is it possible you’ve turned the texting into the same thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve decided the healthy version of you sends a message every two days and asks for nothing in return. You’re following the rule to the letter. But she’s on the other end of it, not answering the texts, and you’re still sending them. At some point, the message stops being for her, right?”

I frown. “So I should stop?”

“I didn’t say that.” She sets the mug down. “I’m asking who the texts are for. If they’re for her, and she needs quiet, you’d have gone quiet a while ago. If they’re for you—so you can feel like you’re doing the right thing while she decides—that’s worth being honest about.”

I look at the plant. “I don’t know. I genuinely can’t tell if I’m doing the right thing or if I’m standing outside her window with a boombox and she just wants me to go away.”

That gets a smile out of her. “That’s more self-awareness than you had two months ago.”

“Two months ago, I was canceling on you.”

“You canceled a couple of appointments when your life was exploding in the press,” she says kindly. “You’ve shown up every week since. I’ve noticed. I want you to notice, too.”

I don’t have anything to say to that, so I let it sit.

“Can I tell you what I actually hear?” she says. “Underneath the texts.”

“Go ahead.”

“I hear a man who fixed everything he could get his hands on. You told your father the truth. You made things right with your friend. You told your GM you want to stay and gave up a pile of money to do it. You went to your brother’s grave. That’s a lot of doors, Briggs, and you walked through all of them in about six weeks.”

“And?”

“And you sound exactly as isolated as you did during our first session, back when you spent forty-five minutes hiding behind your shooting percentage because the truth felt too dangerous.”

“Yeah,” I say, the word catching in my throat. “You think so?”

“You’re doing the work. But the one thing you actually want isn’t a problem you can solve with a checkbook or a better backcheck. It depends entirely on another person’s choice. I know how agonizing it is for a man like you to sit in that kind of uncertainty.”

“I’m handling it,” I mutter.

“Even over a screen, I can tell your knee is going.”