The house was quiet. We’d come home in separate cars, as always. Rook was in the office. The door stood slightly ajar.
I stopped in the hall and looked at it. He never worked with the door open. The gap was for me.
I went to the kitchen because I wasn’t finished being angry. I wanted to walk through that door, but I didn’t know how to hold my ground and make up at the same time.
The doorbell rang. The front door.
I froze. Nobody used that doorbell. The cleaner had keys. Deliveries were left on the step. Rook’s parents were a thousand miles east in Maine. The bell had rung maybe five times since I’d moved in.
The office door opened all the way. Rook came out, and across the length of the hall we looked at each other. The fight was gone, and we were both rattled.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
I moved out of sightline of the door without being told. Rook opened the door.
“Hey, Rook. Sorry to just show up,” Heath said. A beat. “We were hoping to borrow a few minutes with both of you.”
I stepped out where they could see me. Rook didn’t look at me. He just opened the door wide.
“Living room?” Heath asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. He was already moving through the house.
Kieran looked around as he followed, the way he read a zone entry on the ice. He saw the two sets of shoes by the garage door and my road bag at the foot of the stairs.
He sat in the armchair nobody ever sat in. Heath remained standing. Rook came as far as the end of the couch and stopped there, using the blue-line stance.
And I couldn’t stand still in the room. I said, “I’ll get water,” as if we were hosting. I went to the kitchen because my body needed a job.
I was filling the second glass when Heath started talking.
“I won’t make a speech,” he said. “I’ve been watching for three seasons, but I’ve said nothing because it wasn’t my place to speak out, and Kieran told me to wait. He was right. So we waited.”
The water ran over the top of the glass and onto my hand. I shut the tap off.
“I’m going to tell you one thing,” Heath said, “so you know I’m not guessing. The road rooms. Three seasons of them. When the travel coordinator sends the rooming blocks around for input, I look. Buffalo last week, you were in 914 and he was in 911. Philadelphia, across the hall. Detroit, across the hall. It’s not luck, Rook. It’s never been luck. I check the blocks, and when the geometry’s wrong, I suggest a swap. Nobody questions me because nobody questions room assignments.”
I stood in the kitchen holding two glasses of water. The hotel hallways had been short for a long time. They were that way because Heath had been quietly bending the travel sheet for three seasons. The floor beneath me moved an inch.
“We’re not here to push,” Kieran said. “We’re here if you want help, and only if you want it. If you tell us to go, we’ll go, and it’ll never come up again. That’s the whole offer.” He paused. “But I want to say one thing first, because I’m the one in this room who’s qualified to say it. I ran my life the same way you’rerunning yours. I contained everything and handled everything, building a bubble around myself. And I was good at it, but it had a cost. It costs more than you think.”
I came down the hall with the glasses, and I stopped in the doorway. Rook was coming apart.
It started small. He stood at the end of the couch with his arms folded and said, “Three seasons,” and then stopped. He tried again. “I kept you both at—I did that on purpose. The distance. I thought—“ The sentence broke off, and he put his hand over his mouth. His shoulders dropped and started to shake.
They had protected him. He had held them at arm’s length to keep the secret safe, and the whole time they had been defending the secret, redrawing the travel sheet and asking for nothing. They merely waited to be needed in any other way.
Kieran got up from the chair and put his hand on Rook’s shoulder.
Heath crossed the room and touched the back of Rook’s neck.
He didn’t pull away.
I stood in the doorway and watched my man cry in front of other human beings for the first time. It was nearly silent and moved through his body in long shudders.
Heath’s hand stayed at the back of his neck.
I had never seen anyone other than me hold him up. I’d thought that was because I was the only one who understood the real man. I lived with him every home night—the warm, verbal Rook, the one nobody at the rink would believe. It hadn’t occurred to me that it wasn’t a question of understanding; it was a question of being allowed inside. He’d built a castle that not only protected us, it cut him off from the rest of the world.
I didn’t cross the room. I stayed where I was.
