Page 131 of Unmanageable

He doesn’t look like the version of him that played pranks, or told stories, or dragged me into antique stores to play make-believe.

There is no crooked smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. No joke waiting behind his teeth. No ridiculous story about a man named Gary.

None of the weird, stubborn light he carried around.

It is all gone.

What stands in front of me now is just Finnian—stripped raw by fear, exhaustion, and a grief so old it has worn grooves into him.

37

Scottie-girl

“Room 412,” I say, my hand touching his back.

When we step through the door, the silence in the room is total, except for the high, clear whistle of an oxygen concentrator sitting near the window.

There’s a woman sitting in the vinyl armchair by the radiator.

She’s small—much smaller than I expected for someone who managed to produce a six-foot-three professional athlete—with short, curling gray hair and a navy blue cardigan that looks like it’s been washed a thousand times.

She has a book open on her lap, but her thumbs are just spinning around each other, a quiet, repetitive motion that tells me she’s been in this chair since the middle of the night.

“Mom,” Cash says.

His voice is different. It’s not the rumble he uses with me, or the sharp, confident bark he gives the defensemen from the crease.

It’s the voice of a boy who just walked into a kitchen with a scraped knee, looking for the one person in the world who can make it hurt less.

The woman looks up. Her eyes are the exact same shade of brown as Cash’s, but they’re surrounded by a network of fine, deep lines that speak to decades of worry and laughter.

She doesn’t cry. She just lets out a long breath that deflates her small chest, her book sliding off her knees onto the floor as she stands up.

“Oh, Finnian,” she whispers.

She reaches him in three steps, her small, thin arms going around him. Cash drops his head onto her shoulder, his entire frame going loose all at once, his knees bending just enough to let her hold his weight.

They stay like that for a long time—the giant and the small woman, silhouetted against the gray morning light coming through the blinds.

Over her shoulder, I can see the bed.

Matthew O’Connell is a big man—you can see the frame of the shoulders that Cash inherited—but the skin on his face is pulled tight against the bone, dry and yellow like old parchment.

There is a clear plastic tube hooked into his nose, his mouth slightly open as his chest hitches under the scratchy hospital cotton.

His eyes are open, staring at the ceiling tile with a flat, milky focus that doesn’t move when the door clicks closed.

Cash’s mom pulls back from his chest, her hands staying flat against his ribs as she looks up at him.

“The doctors say the fever is coming down, but his lungs… they’re very tired, Finn,” she says, her voice as steady as she can make it. “He walked all the way down to the old trolley tracks. He thought he was meeting your Uncle Jimmy after the night shift at the yard. Jimmy’s been gone since ninety-eight.”

She turns her eyes to me then.

There’s no suspicion in them, no professional curiosity about why her son’s high-priced sports agent is standing in her husband’s hospital room at six in the evening wearing an oversized black hoodie and dirt-streaked sneakers.

She just looks at me with that deep, simple kindness that makes my throat feel like it’s full of dry sand.

“You must be Scottie,” she says, reaching out to take my hand. “Finn told me about you.”