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I want to leap into his arms. I want to hold him and kiss him and tell him that I love him, too.
But I don’t. I’m still glued to the spot. It’s like my mind imagines it happening, but I can’t force one foot in front of the other to actually move. I’m too scared. He hurt me. Deeply. That doesn’t just go away because he’s missing practice.
“I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I had to come fight for you anyway. I had to find some way to make sure you know that you come first. You’re everything to me. I never wanted to become so dependent on one person that my whole world would fall apart if I lost her, but here I am. My world has fallen. I can’t focus, I can’t play, I can’t sleep. Everything I do is punctuated by what I did. I fucked up, Ivy. I know I did, and I’ve never been more sorry about anything in my life. I can’t change what happened, but I can be a better man going forward. Because of you.”
I still can’t quite reconcile that Cash Maddox is standing on my sister’s front porch here in Chicago.
“Ivy? Who was at the door?” a voice calls from inside. “It’s about time to get going.”
A voice. Oh! Right. Everleigh. My sister. I hear her footsteps approaching and a gasp when she looks over my shoulder to see who’s standing there.
“Cash? What are you doing here?”
“I know today is a hard day for you both, and I wanted to show up for Ivy.”
“Don’t you have practice?” she asks. “Wait, don’t you have a game tonight?”
“I wasn’t scheduled to travel with the team since it’s preseason, but yeah. I’m missing practice. Took the red-eye last night, and here I am.”
Everleigh rushes past me and pulls Cash into a hug, surprising the hell out of all of us. “It’s nice to have a familiar face here.”
She gets to hug him, yet I still haven’t. Must be the pregnancy hormones.
I blow out a breath. “We need to leave for court.”
“I’m happy to drive you both if you’d like,” he says, nodding to the car parked out in front of Everleigh’s house.
She looks at me as if she’s waiting for me to answer, and I give the slightest incline of a nod.
“That would be great, thanks,” Everleigh says. “I just need to grab my phone and my bag. Why don’t you wait for us in the car? We’ll be right out.”
His gaze drifts to me, and he nods before he turns and heads to the car. Everleigh takes the flowers from my hands, and she takes my other hand in hers. She carries the flowers to the kitchen, where she lets go of my hand to set the big vase on the counter.
“You okay?” she asks.
“I, uh, I don’t really know.”
“He’s here, Ivy.” She takes both my hands in hers and ducks so her eyes meet mine. “And I trust that you’re an adult who will figure out what to do here. But if you need me for anything, I’m right here, too.”
I bite my lip as I contemplate. “I love him. But I’m scared because of how bad this has hurt. I feel like I’ve lost myself somewhere in all of this. I trusted my gut, and my gut let me down.”
“I get that, babe. I do. But did it let you down if it led you to him despite the warnings from Dex and me?” she asks.
We have to get going, so the question hangs in the air between us.
It’s a question I’ll ponder for likely the rest of the day. Maybe longer.
I want to believe that we can make this work.
But I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get past the fact that I was the punchline of his joke.
CHAPTER 47: Ivy Maddox
Sentencing
We arrive at the court. We walk through the metal detectors, and we head toward the courtroom his sentencing is set to take place in.
Standing outside the courtroom doors is none other than Maverick Jennings with Ford and Tatum.
