The Last One Standing
He hadn't moved, and he wasn't leaving. Water sheeted off the brim of his cap in a steady rope, his windbreaker gone dark and heavy with rain, both hands cupped around his mouth as he shouted something Callum couldn't hear over the storm but could read anyway, because he'd read that same shape a thousand times: *Let's go, Cal.*
The second half was a slow, muddy death. Callum threw for what yardage he could get, took two sacks that left him seeing stars, and watched his team's last real chance evaporate on a fourth-and-three with ninety seconds left, a slant route that slipped through Marquez's rain-slicked hands by half an inch.
The clock ran out on a kneel-down nobody wanted to take. Final score: theirs, by eleven.
Callum stood in the mud at midfield in the ringing silence that follows any loss, helmet under his arm, rain running down the back of his neck, watching the other team pile onto each other twenty yards away. Around him what remained of the crowd — a scattered, soaked handful — began filing out, defeated by weather as much as by the score.
He looked up at Section 12 anyway. Old habit. Maybe the last time it would ever matter.
Warren was still there. Alone now — the last spectator in the entire stadium, standing in a downpour that had chased away every fair-weather father and every stranger with a complicated claim, both fists raised over his head, cheering like they'd just won state.
Cheering for a losing team. For a kid who wasn't his. Like both of those facts had never once, in seventeen years, changed a single thing about what he showed up for.
Something in Callum's chest gave way entirely — grief and gratitude finally untangling from each other, the same knot that had been sitting in him since the garage floor.
He started walking, then jogging, toward the fence line below Section 12, ignoring the security guard already moving to intercept anyone crossing the perimeter. Warren saw him coming and was already climbing over the low rail himself, drenched navy windbreaker and all, meeting him halfway across the sodden grass.
The guard opened his mouth to object. Callum lifted a hand without looking back, and — maybe reading something on both their faces — the man let it go.
Warren reached him first, breathing hard, rain running off his jaw, and pulled him into a hug tight enough to hurt.
"I read the notebook," Callum said into his shoulder, voice breaking. "I know everything."
Warren went very still. Then, quiet, right against his ear, just loud enough to carry over the storm: "Then you know I'm not going anywhere. Never was."