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Melvin Junior was across the room in his pajamas, and had spent the last month trying to get Drew to sign with him. If anybody ever went looking, a gift like this from that family, a week before his last game, was the kind of thing that got a guy suspended and got his school in trouble. It was why he’d paid for his own plane ticket up here. He hadn’t even let Nicole buy him a pretzel at the airport.

He looked up. MJ was watching him, and when Drew met his eyes, MJ gave him one small nod. He knew.

Drew put the card back in the envelope and the envelope back in the box. Then he turned to Nicole, who was sitting on the floor by his feet in her pajamas with her knees pulled up.

“Hold on to this for me,” he said, low enough that only she could hear. “Till after the game.”

For a second she just looked at him. Then she nodded, no questions asked. She took the box and set it beside her own pile, and he leaned down and kissed the top of her head, and when he straightened up, Roxanne was watching them.

“That was very thoughtful of him,” Roxanne said, and took a sip of her coffee.

Drew didn’t know what to say to that, so he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

The rest of Christmas went by too fast.

Christmas dinner was in the dining room, at a table long enough to land a plane on, with real silver and three kinds of pie, and Mama Gussie stood over him until he took seconds of everything. He called home from the phone in the guest room that afternoon. His mom said “Merry Christmas” and “Are they treating you all right?” and not a whole lot else. His dad got on the extension and wanted to hear about the shot in Melvin’s gym again, start to finish, and Drew told him, and didn’t say a word about the tickets. He wanted to see his dad’s face when he handed them over.

Tiffany said maybe ten words to him the rest of the break, and four of them were “Pass the macaroni, please.” And every night he was there, around one in the morning, the guest room door opened without a knock, and Nicole climbed in next to him and was back upstairs before Mama Gussie came down to start the biscuits.

The morning after Christmas, the car came for him before it was light out. Nicole walked him to it in her robe and kissed him on the front steps with her mother’s wreaths all around them. Then he flew to Orlando to play his last college football game.

Her dad had already left Orlando by the time Drew landed. Nicole had told him he would be gone, and Drew still caught himself looking around the airport for him.

Bowl week was pretty much everything at once. Practice every morning, meetings and film every afternoon, and somewhere in between, the Citrus Bowl people dragged both teams all over central Florida. There was a team dinner, a banquet, a day at Disney World, and a media day where Drew sat at a folding table under a tent for three hours and answered the same six questions about the draft.

Jed hung off to the side the entire time with a clipboard, nodding. The NFL scouts were there too. They were always there now, guys in windbreakers with team logos on the chest, standing along the fence at practice and writing shit down whenever he threw.

On New Year’s Eve, curfew was eleven. Drew watched Tariq’s Sugar Bowl on the TV in his hotel room with Tanner, who kept saying he was going to sneak out to find a party and never got up off the other bed. They were both asleep before the ball dropped.

The next afternoon, Drayton won.

The other team was one of the best in the Big Ten, and pretty much everybody on TV had picked them to win. Drew threw three touchdown passes, and the last one came with under two minutes left, a ball he put up high toward the corner of the end zone where only Dayshawn could get it.

Drayton went up 31–27, and when the other team got the ball back, the defense stopped them cold. All Drew had to do after that was take the last snap and drop to one knee. That was it. When a quarterback took a knee, the play was over the second his knee touched the grass, and the clock kept running. Do that enough times, and the clock ran out and the game was over, and nobody could do a damn thing about it.

The clock ran out. Drew stood there on the field with the ball in his hand and the noise coming down on him from every direction, and for a second he didn’t move. Then Dayshawn crashed into him so hard they both nearly went down, and the rest of the team piled on.

He’d been playing football since he was a little kid. Five years in Alabama, four of them on the field. And that was it. That was the last one.

He took his time walking off. Right before the tunnel, he stopped and looked back at the field, the grass all torn up and the confetti still falling and his teammates out there jumping on each other, and he went row by row up the stands until he found them. His dad was on his feet with both arms in the air. His mom was clapping. And next to her, Nicole was standing on her seat in his old navy hoodie and screaming her head off.

His mom had spent every minute since Nicole landed in Orlando ignoring her as much as humanly possible. Nicole had told him so on the phone the night before. Drew didn’t know what to do about that yet. He’d figure it out. He’d just won his last college football game, and right then he couldn’t think about anything except how badly he wanted to get to her.

Outside the locker room, after his shower, after the press and Jed and about a hundred people he didn’t know clapping him on the back, Nicole walked up to him with the white envelope in her hand.

“It’s after the game,” she said.

He laughed. Then he took the envelope and handed it to his dad.

His father opened it right there in the hallway under the stadium. He read the letter, and then the card, and then the letter again, and then he looked up at Drew, and Tommy Kiernan, who had something to say about everything, couldn’t come up with a single word.

“Courtside, Dad,” Drew said. “You and me.”

His dad stared at him. “Well, fuck,” he said, and then he was laughing and grabbing Drew by the back of the neck and hauling him in. “Holy shit, Drew. Courtside!”

His mom looked over his dad’s arm at the card. “That’s very generous,” she said. To Drew. Not to Nicole.

Nicole flew home to Virginia the next morning. Her family’s lawyers wanted to sit down with her and go over Phallon’s letter before classes started. The team flew back to Alabama the same afternoon, and MJ flew in that night.