I didn't want Tasha to leave the next morning. I wanted her to come to the hospital with me, and then, eventually, back to Brooks and then to wherever I ended up when I was drafted. I guess I had done some growing up since I'd last lived in Little Falls, though, because I didn't ask her for any of those things. She had a job, a whole life, and I wasn't anything more than a temporary part of it.

My dad was sitting in a private waiting room when I arrived at the hospital. The doctor was scheduled to brief us at around noon but I wanted to be there earlier. My father's face was unshaven and there was a sudden 'old man-ness' to him that scared me when I saw it. We talked about unrelated things, life at Brooks, what NFL team I was hoping for, the fact that he'd started to get into cooking. At just after eleven, a doctor in a white coat walked into the waiting room. My dad and I both looked up at him, searching his face for any sign of whether or not what he was about to say was good or bad news. There was none. At least he didn't torture us with preliminaries.

"The swelling in Mrs. Barlow's brain has come down overnight. It's still too early to talk about long-term prognosis but I think I can say we have moved into 'cautiously optimistic' territory."

Confused, I looked to my father and saw that he was crying. It was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry and my immediate instinct was to join him. I didn't, though. He needed me to be strong for him and for my mother.

"I - um, I'm not sure what that means," I said to the doctor. "Long-term prognosis? Does this mean she's, she's, uh..."

I couldn't say it. I couldn't ask if it meant my mother was going to live, because that would have meant acknowledging that she might die. Fortunately, the doctor knew where I was going.

"Mrs. Barlow is still in a very serious condition, I want you to understand that. We'll have to wait until she wakes up to get a more realistic picture of what can be expected but the immediate danger has passed."

I asked a few more questions before the doctor left, but it was clear that he expected my mother to live. Nothing else he said, about how she would be when she woke up, really sunk in. All I heard was that she was going to live. It was all my father heard, too. When we were alone again he slumped forward with his hands covering his face and sobbed quietly for a few seconds. Then he wiped his eyes and looked up at me.

"I'm sorry, son. I'm sorry, this isn't-"

"Dad," I said, my voice breaking, "don't say sorry. There's nothing to be sorry for."

And then I started crying, too, overwhelmed by the news and the emotion of the moment. My dad reached out and we wrapped our arms around each other. I've always been close to my parents, but my dad is one of those stoic dads, all back slaps and approving nods. Our relationship was different after my mother's accident. It was better, too. Like it was OK for him - for both of them - to rely on me as a grown man at that point.

We were allowed to see my mother briefly. Her face, swollen and bruised, was so covered in bandages and tubes and wires that led to beeping monitors I could barely tell it was her. I kissed her forehead and held her hand and whispered to her that I loved her, that I was going to take care of her - of them - when she got out.

I wandered the sunlit hospital hall afterward, so my dad could have some time alone with her. I was elated. My mother was going to live. It didn't matter if she needed help. She was going to live. And my life was changed forever. It took me a few months, maybe longer, to understand just how different things were but I felt it from the very moment I got the phone call at Brooks. So many of the things that I had worried about suddenly seemed so inconsequential. And so many of the other things - other people - that I had somehow come to picture in my mind as permanent, revealed themselves to be terrifyingly transient and impermanent.

When I spoke to Tasha on the phone that evening, after spending the day at the hospital with my parents, the entire conversation felt suffused with a kind of poignancy that was deeply unfamiliar to me.

"So, it's good news then?" She asked after I'd updated her.

"Yes," I replied, unable to shake the thoughts that were spinning through my mind - what if something terrible happened to Tasha? What if she got hurt and I wasn't there to take care of her? What if she didn't know I loved her?

"Are you sure?" She asked, as I reeled at the admission I'd just made to myself, that I still loved her.

"Yeah, yes," I stammered. "I mean, they don't know what kind of support she'll need when she wakes up but she's going to - she's going to wake up."

My throat was thick again but I choked the emotion back down. Tasha had spent the night with me, yes, and for a few brief hours, it had felt like old times, like a reprieve from real life. But she was businesslike as ever, her tone caring but also distant. I could hear her doing things in the background of the call, the clinking of dishware being put in the sink, the whirring of a blender and the running chatter of Rosa. Tasha was busy. Tasha was always busy, because she had to be.

Two days later, my mother woke up. Within thirty minutes we knew she was still herself. She had no memory of the accident and she seemed very confused about why she was in the hospital but she was herself, I could see it in her eyes when she looked at me - and at my dad. The first full sentence out of her mouth - if you don't count "I love you" - was directed towards my dad.

"Did you water the flower beds?"

My mom was OK. Well, she was mentally OK. It was going to be days, weeks even, before we knew what she was capable of physically. It was decided that I would go back to Brooks to finish the semester, write my final exams and pack up my life there. After the draft, decisions would be made. I wanted my parents to come to wherever it was I was going to be living, but no one knew where that would be. The day of my flight back to California I asked Tasha to meet me for coffee in town but she declined. That wall had gone up again, the wall that was always, always there with her. She wasn't mean - she was actually kind and supportive the whole time, even offering to visit my parents after I'd returned to Brooks, just to make sure everything was OK with them. But it was just like it had been in high school - as if the evening we'd spent in each other's arms simply hadn't happened. Or, if it had, that it was no big deal. If it hadn't been for the turmoil of my mother's accident and the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming draft, I don't know how I would have handled it at all.

In July, shortly after I received my final exam results - solid B's across the board - and a week or so after my mother went home from the hospital, I was drafted, as predicted by seemingly every sports journalist in North America, first overall by the Dallas Cowboys . My agent - Barry - who my dad had overseen the hiring of back in January, wanted me to allow TV cameras to film me when it happened but I just wasn't up to it. So I found out in my dorm, sitting on a leather sofa with a few of the stragglers who still hadn't left for the summer. We watched it on TV and celebrated with a few beers. According to the other guys, it was apparent that the two main factors being celebrated were a)my newfound riches and b)my newfound access to 'top-shelf pussy.'

The riches were going to help. It was costing my parents over ten thousand dollars a month to employ two people to help with my mother's care and provide them with the needed equipment, and even at that price, it wasn't going to make even a tiny dent in my new salary. I was rich. As for the pussy, I wasn't sure. I was, by that point, pretty used to the status-quo. The status-quo being women threw themselves at me and I declined. Maybe I would wake up one day and Natasha Greeley would be a faded memory, maybe I wouldn't. It was stupid of me to sleep with her when I went back to Little Falls but I never could control how I felt around her.

That night, she sent me a painfully brief e-mail.

"Hi Kaden! I saw you got drafted by the Cowboys - congratulations! I'm also happy to hear your mother is well on her way to healing. I'm just messaging to let you know that my life is pretty hectic right now and I think it's best for both of us if we move on from everything. But I want you to know that I care about you and I wish you the best. Try not to spend all your money on sports cars, OK? - Tasha."

I should have been on top of the world. My phone was buzzing every few seconds with new interview requests, well wishes and congratulations. I wasn't ungrateful, I just felt oddly empty. The dorm, shorn of the posters and furniture and detritus that comes with young men, was barren. My voice echoed around the bare room when I spoke. And now I was off to Texas, a place I had never been before that was now going to be my home. For how long? I didn't know.

I called my parents that night. The first thing my mom asked me was whether or not I had a place to live in Dallas.

"Barry's taking care of that," I told her. "He's already got someone looking for a place and if it isn't sorted out by the time I get there, there's a hotel close to the training ground where I can stay. A nice hotel."

"OK, Kaden," my mom replied. She spoke slowly and with great care. I could hear her choosing each of her words before she spoke. "Does the hotel have a kitchen? How will you eat?"

I laughed. "Mom, did you see how much money I'm making? I can have Kobe beef flown in on a private jet from Japan if I want. Don't worry!"

"I guess you're right," she replied, sounding slightly sad. "You were all over the Little Falls news tonight, you know. Your life is about to change, Kaden. I wish your father and I could be with you, we-"

"Mom!" I said. "We talked about this. You can't travel right now and dad wants to be there with you. I understand. I can make it to Texas on my own, you don't have to worry. I'll have enough to eat and a bed to sleep in, everything will be fine."

After I spoke to my dad and we hung up I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering if that was the last night I was ever going to sleep in anything like a dorm room again. I tried to think of the things I could do with all the money coming my way, but for some reason, it just wasn't interesting. Houses, boats, cars, investments. None of it held any interest. The only thing I really cared about doing with the money was helping my parents. That was something concrete, something real. They'd fought me at first but our roles were evolving, they had been ever since the accident. Before the accident my father would have refused the money and that would have been that. After the accident, it was me who insisted, who simply informed them that the payments for my mom's care would be made by me from July onwards.

In spite of my efforts to think of literally anything except her, eventually, Tasha appeared in mind's eye. I wondered how she'd heard the news. Had she waited for it? Had she Googled my name and clicked 'News' and read the top results with interest or had one of her co-workers told her over the water cooler? I could have helped Tasha. I could have helped her family. But I knew she would have turned me down. I knew that just offering would have been seen as an insult. She was so stubborn. All anyone could say to me was that I was young, talented, good-looking, rich - in short, that I could have anything I wanted. It's what I'd been hearing since I was a child.

But I couldn't have everything I wanted, because I couldn't have her. And the truth of it was, I wanted her more than I wanted any of the rest of it.

I fell asleep with Tasha on my mind and took a taxi to the airport the next morning, bleary-eyed and still trying desperately to face my bright, shiny future head-on.