Chapter 1 - The Two A.M. Call

The last person I expected to see in those stands was a man I'd spent fourteen years trying to forget. Watching my son glide out for warmups, I had an itch under my skin that told me the night was going to be about something a lot bigger than a trophy.

The phone went off at two in the morning, a Tuesday in November, fourteen years back. I can still feel the cold of the kitchen linoleum under my bare feet, and I can still hear the way Kurt's voice came apart before he got a whole sentence out.

"Ray. She's gone. Nicole's gone."

I squeezed the phone until my hand ached. Nicole was my best friend's wife. She was thirty-one. An aneurysm, Kurt said. Nothing before it. No headache she'd mentioned, no warning at all.

Their little boy, Cole, was four. He was asleep down the hall, waiting for his mom to make him breakfast in a few hours.

"I can't do this, Ray. I can't." He said it over and over, like a loop he couldn't climb out of.

"I know, buddy. I know. I'll be there first thing. Just hang on till morning."

I drove over at sunrise with two gas-station coffees and no real idea what I was walking into.

I knocked. Nobody came. I tried the handle and the door swung open. The house was dead quiet except for cartoons turned down low, and Cole sitting on the carpet in his pajamas, eating dry cereal out of a plastic bowl with his fingers.

Kurt wasn't there.

There was a note on the counter. Four words in his handwriting. "I'm not built for this."

I was twenty-eight. No wife, no kids, a mechanic pulling down eighteen bucks an hour at a shop off Route 9.

I stood in that kitchen holding two coffees I didn't want anymore, and Cole looked up at me with Nicole's exact eyes and asked, "Where's Daddy?"

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That was the moment. Right there on that carpet. I decided I was going to be the best father that kid could ever ask for.

Nicole's parents were gone. Kurt's mother was in a memory-care place in Millbrook and didn't know what year it was. The only other road for Cole was foster care, and my brain just wouldn't hold that picture.