The game is at ten AM. Under-twelve, recreational league, a park in Roxborough with two fields and a concession stand that serves terrible coffee in Styrofoam cups. Theo Briggs buys one anyway because the alternative is nothing, and he has been coaching his son Marcus's team for two seasons and he knows that the coffee, terrible as it is, is one of the constants that make Sunday mornings feel like something solid.
Marcus is eleven. He plays midfield with more enthusiasm than skill and a determination that Briggs finds painful in the best way — the same determination that Sandra always says Marcus got from him, which Briggs accepts as a compliment even when he is not sure it is one.
Danny, the younger one, is nine, and is in the bleachers with Sandra, eating a granola bar and reading something on his tablet with the serene disconnection of a child who has decided soccer is not his thing and feels no particular need to pretend otherwise.
Sandra is in a green jacket, her hair pulled back, watching the game with the partial attention of someone who is also doing three other things simultaneously. She is doing better. This is how Briggs measures her days — not by some abstract scale of wellness, but by the specificity of whether she is better or worse, which is the only scale that has ever made sense to him.
Her left eye still does not track properly. Her hearing in the left ear is a permanent subtraction. On the days when she holds Danny's hand without thinking about it, or laughs at something on the radio without seeming surprised that she is laughing, Briggs counts those as better.
Today is better.
The whistle blows. Marcus chases a loose ball with his whole body and misses it and does not stop chasing. Briggs calls something encouraging from the sideline. He means it.
He has a phone in his jacket pocket. Not the work phone — the other one, the prepaid, that he has been cycling through every three months since 2019. There is one message on it, from a contact he has met in person exactly twice, that gives him a name and a neighborhood. Nothing else. He does not need anything else.
He will deal with it Tuesday evening.
Until then: the game. The terrible coffee. Marcus running himself into the ground with a smile on his face that is exactly Sandra's smile, which is the thing Briggs thinks about more than anything else when he is in the dark with the river.
He cups his hands around the Styrofoam. He watches his son. He is, by every visible measure, a man who has built a life worth protecting.
He believes that completely.
He has never questioned whether the things he does to protect it are part of it or separate from it.
He is not sure what he would find if he did.
The whistle blows again. Marcus scores, or tries to. The crowd applauds, uncertain whether it counts.
Briggs is already clapping.