Page 98 of What If I See You

Watching him laugh with his brother or talk hockey with his dad, those are all things I never experienced growing up. We never had the encouraging talks around the dinner table. If it wasn’t a fight of some sort, it was my parents telling me what to do or what they scheduled me to do.

Or it was them telling me why my decisions were less than stellar. They never loved my group of friends. If it were up to them, I probably wouldn’t have had much of a social life at all. At least not until they met Corrigan. My parents loved her, but only because they respected the fact she’s a nurse, which to them is an admiral job. I guess someone in charge of making money for a hospital that provides care to children didn’t mean shit to them. To them I was just a money grabber.

Griffin is blessed with a wonderful, loving family.

And watching him with them, it seems he never takes that for granted.

“Can I help you finish up in here, Layken?” Gail asks, walking into the kitchen and grabbing a towel.

“Oh, um, sure.” I hand her a glass bowl I just finished washing and then she dries the other dishes I placed on the drying rack. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” she says with a smile. She moves around the kitchen putting dishes away as she dries them and I have to remind myself that she’s been here way more times than I have and probably knows every single thing about Griffin’s apartment.

Every nook and cranny.

Every piece of décor.

Hell, she probably purchased much of the stuff around here herself. I should’ve thought of bringing a few more things from my place here for days like this. The idea never once crossed my mind.

I’ll grab a few things tomorrow while I’m out.

“You’ve been pretty quiet today, sweetheart,” Gail mentions. “You okay?”

I turn my face to glance at her and she catches my eyes from underneath her glasses. I can tell from her expression it’s a sincere ask. She’s not trying to be nosey.

“Yeah.” I sigh. “Just a lot on my mind today I think.”

“Was this your first time seeing Griffin get hurt?”

Huffing out a laugh, I bob my head. “I mean, I had seen him get hurt a few times when I would watch him play. Little things, you know? I’ve seen him checked several times, obviously. And a few nights ago, with the skate blade to his arm. But yeah, this is the first big injury, for lack of a better word, that he’s gotten since I’ve been around.”

“Scary, isn’t it?”

I nod. “Very. I don’t think I’ll ever unsee him lying lifeless on the ice. And I’ll never unhear the scream when Darius rolled him over.”

She nods too as I describe those moments to her. “Sounds about right. When Griffin was a kid he broke his ankle during a game. Got all tripped up and fell right on it. Even though I know it’s not really possible, I swear to God I heard that bone snap in that moment. To me, it was the loudest sound I had ever heard even though in reality, I didn’t hear it at all.” She looks out past the half wall of the kitchen to the living room where the guys are watching television. “Grant had to pick him up and carry him to the car, uniform and all that day. The bone was shattered.”

“Oh, my gosh! That’s awful.”

“He was devastated. Thought he would never play again.” She inhales a deep breath and sighs with a loving smile on her face. “But six months later he was back on the ice as if it had never happened in the first place.”

“Wow.”

“When Griffin puts his mind to something, when he really wants it, he makes it happen. He’s tougher than I give him credit for sometimes.”

Gail goes back to drying some of the other dishes as I wipe down counters. A comfortable silence falls between us and then out of nowhere she says, “He loves you very much.”

Her comment catches me totally off guard.

“What?”

She smiles, knowing her comment did exactly what she wanted it to do. “I can see it all over his face. The way he looks at you.”

“You do?”

She nods. “I’ve never seen him look at a woman the way he looks at you.” She shrugs her shoulder. “Maybe it’s a mom thing. But we can tell. We know. There’s a kind of love and longing in the way he looks at you. Like you own his world and he hangs on your every word.”

He looks at me a certain way?

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