The team bus arrived at the Clemson campus at eleven in the morning with the national championship trophy sticking out of the front window, because someone had decided that was the best way to announce their return, and nobody had found a convincing enough argument to change the plan.
The campus was already waiting.
It wasn't the kind of welcome organized in advance, but the kind that happens when word spreads across every available channel that the national champion team's bus is twenty minutes away. People simply stepped outside, because staying indoors was not an option anyone was willing to consider that day.
There were students on the sidewalk, on the grass, and climbed up on the structures lining the main campus entrance. Banners made during the night displayed the word CHAMPIONS written in the specific orange of the Clemson program. A guy with a trumpet played something that wasn't recognizable as any particular song, but it had the right energy, and nobody asked him to stop because this wasn't the kind of moment where anyone pauses to evaluate the technical quality of what they are hearing.
The players stepped off the bus one by one, and each was greeted with the specific volume generated by several hundred people who had been waiting outside in the cold for hours—because the alternative was missing the moment, and they weren't willing to do that.
Laquon got off with his phone held high, recording everything before his feet even touched the campus ground.
Gallman got off, and someone placed the championship hat on him—the one he had been wearing since Glendale and hadn't taken off for the entire flight back.
Dabo stepped off last with the trophy in his hands, and the noise from the campus rose to a level that was probably heard in the buildings across the street, and was definitely heard on the top three floors of the administration building, where employees were leaning out the windows to see what was happening.
Wyatt was not there.
In the welcome the campus was giving the national champion team, nobody asked about him at that moment. There were too many other things to look at and too much noise to notice the absence of a specific person. But if anyone had searched for number 10 among the players stepping off the bus, they would not have found him.
Wyatt's room in the team dorm had the lights off, with the only illumination coming through the window. Through it came the muffled noise of the campus celebration, sounding like something belonging to a different day altogether.
Wyatt was sitting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed on the bathroom door.
He had been in that position ever since Blaire walked in there with the pregnancy test in her hand, the door closing behind her with that specific sound of doors closed slowly when someone doesn't want to make noise—even though noise wasn't the main issue at that moment. Wyatt hadn't shifted his elbows or changed the direction of his gaze since then, finding no compelling reason to do either while he waited.
The clock on the nightstand read 10:42.
The campus celebrated outside with an intensity Wyatt could hear even with the window closed, and he wasn't out there because there were things that mattered more than being out there. Blaire was one of them, and whatever was happening in that bathroom was another.
The door opened.
Blaire stepped out with the pregnancy test in her right hand and stood in the doorway without saying anything yet. She looked at Wyatt with an expression he had learned to read over the last two and a half years—not fear, exactly, but something closer to the suspended state people are in when they are waiting for the world to confirm something they already know, but haven't officially confirmed yet.
Wyatt looked at her from the edge of the bed.
The two of them looked at each other for a moment while the campus kept celebrating outside, the test was in Blaire's hand, and the clock kept marking time—even though, at that specific moment, time didn't seem to be behaving normally.
"How much time is left?" Wyatt asked.
"A minute," Blaire said. "More or less."
Wyatt nodded.
Silence.
The noise from the campus arrived from outside in waves, depending on which way the wind blew.
Wyatt looked at the test in Blaire's hand, then looked at Blaire, and then looked straight ahead again with his hands clasped between his knees.
"Have you thought of names?" Wyatt said, without taking his eyes off the front.
Blaire looked at him with the expression of someone who was not expecting that question at that specific moment in the universe.
"What?"
"Names," Wyatt repeated. "If it's a boy, I want him to be named Peyton. Peyton Sterling sounds good. If it's a girl, I have no idea yet." He paused for half a second. "ESPN?"
Blaire looked at him for a moment to check if he was being serious, and concluded that he was indeed being serious—at least to the extent that Wyatt Sterling was capable of being serious about naming someone ESPN Sterling.
"ESPN Sterling," Wyatt said with the exact same tone he would have used for any completely normal name.
Blaire opened her mouth, closed it, and then laughed.
It wasn't a long or elaborate laugh, but the specific kind of laugh that comes out when the body has been holding something in for too long and suddenly finds an unexpected outlet. Under the specific circumstances of that moment, in that room, with the campus celebrating outside and the test still in her hand, it was exactly what both of them needed without having planned it.
"You're an idiot," Blaire said, still with some laughter in her voice.
"ESPN is a perfectly valid name," Wyatt said, without moving from the edge of the bed.
"I've always liked Juliet," Blaire said after a moment, her voice calmer than before, though still carrying some of the relief from the laugh. "If it's a girl, Juliet."
"Juliet Sterling," Wyatt said, testing it out.
Blaire looked at him.
"Sounds good," Wyatt said.
Blaire looked down at the test in her hand again, and both of them knew at the same time that it was time to look at it. There was no remaining reason to keep waiting, because the result was already there whether they looked at it or not.
Blaire lowered it slowly, and both of them looked at it at the same time, without either giving a signal that it was time—because no signal was needed.
Two lines.
Wyatt took a deep breath, the kind of breath you take when air hasn't been coming in properly for longer than usual.
Blaire did the same.
The campus kept celebrating outside with the same intensity it had maintained since early morning, completely unaware of what was happening in that room with the window closed and the lights off, where the test showed two lines that left no room for doubt about anything.
"We have to tell your parents," Blaire said, her voice carrying the calm of someone who has made a decision and knows that the only thing left to do after making a decision is to carry it out.
Wyatt nodded.
"Yeah," he said.
Ed and Elena were on the first floor of the same building, in one of the guest rooms the Clemson program had reserved for the families of players who traveled to Glendale—which in this case included the Sterlings, because Dabo had insisted they stay as long as they needed before returning to Katy.
Ed was sitting in the chair by the window with the morning newspaper that someone had slid under the door at eight o'clock. It had a photo of the trophy on the front page with a large headline that left no doubt about what had happened the night before in Glendale. Ed had read it completely, from the first page to the sports section without skipping a thing, because that was how he read the newspaper when he had time, and this morning he had time.
Elena was finishing packing their bags for the return flight to Houston, scheduled for that afternoon. Ed was not the type of person to extend trips longer than necessary, and Elena had learned long ago that arguing about that was a battle not worth the energy—though this time, admittedly, she didn't have many reasons to want to stay longer either.
There were two knocks at the door.
Ed looked up from the newspaper.
"Come in," he said.
The door opened and Wyatt entered first, with Blaire behind him. Ed looked at both of them with the same expression he had while reading the paper—the expression of someone processing information before reacting to it, in no hurry to do otherwise.
Elena left the suitcase open on the bed and turned toward them.
"You need to sit down," Wyatt said, closing the door behind him. "Both of you."
Something in his tone made Elena sit on the edge of the bed without asking anything, and made Ed set the newspaper down on the table next to the window with the same calm he had maintained while reading it. However, something in his eyes shifted slightly upon seeing their faces.
"What happened?" Elena said.
Wyatt looked at Blaire.
Blaire handed him the pregnancy test.
Wyatt took it and placed it on the table next to the newspaper, where both adults could see it without anyone needing to explain what it was—because it was perfectly obvious what it was.
The silence that followed was the kind that has weight of its own, settling into a room in a way that makes the available space feel smaller than it is. Wyatt had learned to recognize it over his years at Clemson as the sign that whatever follows that silence is going to matter more than anything said before it.
Elena looked at the test for several seconds without saying anything, then looked at Wyatt, then looked at Blaire, and then looked back at the test—as if a second glance might change what she had seen in the first.
Ed didn't say anything either for a moment that was long enough for Wyatt to notice his mother had an expression he hadn't seen many times in his life. It was considerably more serious than Wyatt had anticipated, given that Elena was generally not the person with serious expressions in the family.
"Mom," Wyatt started, "I want you to know that I'm going to..."
"Wyatt," Ed said.
Just the name.
Nothing else.
Wyatt closed his mouth.
Ed looked at him from the chair by the window with that expression Wyatt had known since childhood, meaning that what came next was something his father had thought through well enough to say in few words—because Ed Sterling was the kind of person who didn't need many words to say what he had to say.
"You're an adult now," Ed said, in the low, direct voice he used when something was important, which Wyatt had learned since childhood to distinguish from any other tone his father used. This specific tone meant the conversation was over before it began. "You made an adult decision, and now you have to take responsibility for it. As you should. A man takes care of what is his."
He didn't raise his voice at any point.
He didn't need to, because the low voice carried exact weight, just as if he had said it shouting, and both of them knew it.
Wyatt looked at him for a second and then looked at his mother, who was looking at him with that same seriousness Wyatt didn't remember seeing in her with that intensity before. In a way, it weighed more than his father's look, because his mother was generally the person who found the less serious side of things, and the fact that she wasn't doing it this time told Wyatt everything he needed to know about how both of them were processing this.
Wyatt nodded once without saying anything, because there was nothing to say that his father hadn't already said in those two sentences. Anything additional Wyatt could add was going to be inferior to what he had just heard, and both of them knew it, and the room knew it too.
Outside, the Clemson campus kept celebrating the national championship with the same intensity it had maintained since the bus arrived first thing in the morning, knowing absolutely nothing about what was happening in that first-floor guest room, with the pregnancy test on the table next to the newspaper featuring the photo of the trophy on the front page.
Author thought
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