“I’m not trying to be a burden,” I tell her. “I’ve got no plans to disrupt what you have going on. Honestly, I’ve never wanted children and I’m the first to admit I’d be a terrible father. But knowing I have one out there … I’d be remiss if I didn’t use the opportunity to meet her just once, especially if I’m here.”
If I didn’t, it could haunt me the rest of my life. All I’d have is that five-minute exchange in the parking lot with her beautiful mother. It’d be one of those memories that come at random, that take up residence in the back of my mind. It’d feel like a movie I never finished and never will. An unsettled incompleteness.
“I appreciate this more than you’ll ever know,” I tell her.
Dragging my hands through my hair, I finger comb it back into place, ignoring the niggling voice in my head wondering if this is all some kind of extortion ploy. In my earlier, more naïve days, I met a sweet, unassuming Mary Sue type. Shy in a sexy way. She happened to be in my path when I was plastered at a hotel bar after a grueling tournament in London. We screwed for hours like a couple of sex-depraved animals, and I left before the sun came up the following morning to catch a flight. A month later, she’d reached out to my PR rep claiming she had a sex tape of us as well as a handful of compromising photos she was going to leak to the press if I didn’t give her half a mil in cash.
I didn’t give in to her, and my attorneys were able to get to the bottom of her blackmail scheme, but I learned early on to keep even the nicest people at arm’s length. Money tends to draw in the crazies like flies to honey.
“I thought we could do this at my home,” Rossi says. “It’d be private, which I’m sure is important to you—it’s important to me, too.”
It’s like we’re speaking the same language.
I’d almost go so far as to stamp this as too good to be true.
“Just the three of us,” she adds.
“Perfect.”
“Is this your cell? I can text you my address. Where are you staying?”
I pace the hotel suite, one hand in my pocket. “In the city. West of downtown.”
“So you’re about an hour away from me then. Lucia goes to bed around eight. Would six work?”
“Lucia?” I ask. “Is that her name.”
I’m met with deafening silence on the other end. Followed by a small, “Yes.”
Lucia.
I have a daughter and her name is Lucia.
That one little detail does nothing more than add weight to the gravity of this situation, to make the reality of all of this a little more … vibrant.
I let it sink in for a few seconds, and then I pull my shit together.
“Six o’clock?” Pulling the phone from my ear, I check the time. It’s four thirty now. “I’ll make it work.”
We hang up and a minute later, my phone chimes with a text containing her address. I copy and paste it into a search window to make sure it’s legit—because stranger things have happened—and I’m met with an expired real estate listing for a three-bedroom bungalow. White with a lacquered yellow door, bright like daffodils and sunshine—not quite the electric color of a tennis ball, but close enough. With a deep front porch, hanging ferns, and flower bushes lining the driveway and sidewalk—just like my parents had at my childhood home.
I scroll through fifteen listing pictures. The house was built in the seventies, but the inside has been completely updated. White kitchen. Pale gray walls. Light wood floors. There’s a fireplace in the family room and a little covered deck off the dinette. The back yard is encased with a wooden picket fence painted in a shade that matches the fluffy clouds in the blue-sky background.
Clicking away from the movie-scene house, I shoot Taylor a text. I’d brought her along on the trip in case I needed someone to run errands to handle any miscellaneous inconveniences that might’ve come up, but tonight she’s off the clock.
She responds within seconds, asking where I’m going.
Heading to the en-suite bath, I brush my teeth, comb my hair, and freshen up. While we’re past the first impression phase, making myself presentable is a part of who I am.
I don’t reply to Taylor—where I’m going tonight is a private matter, and since she’s off the clock, it’s no longer her concern.
Grabbing my keys, I make my way to the elevator, grab my SUV from valet, type her address into the nav and start my journey.
An hour later, I’m pulling into the floral-encased driveway of the same little white house from the pictures—but before I so much as shift into park, I’m overtaken by the very same wild, adrenaline-fueled frenzy that normally fills my chest right before a match. A sensation so strong, it pulls me out of my body for a second, to somewhere else completely.