She holds the door and reads my face for a second the way her daughter reads faces — and I remember, distantly, someone telling me Carolyn’s the one Aspen gets it from, more her sister Lisa than herself, the watching, the seeing-too-much. Whatever she finds on me, she doesn’t ask. She steps back and lets me in.
“He’s through in the back,” she says. “Go on. I’ll bring you something to drink.”
Coach is in his chair with a drink and a game on with the sound down, and he looks up when I come in. He doesn’t stand. He doesn’t smile. He reads me the way he’s read ten thousand kids walking in carrying something. Takes him about a second.
“Did you get her pregnant?”
It hits me somewhere I can’t let him see, because of all the questions in the world, that’s the one — that one — and he has no idea what he’s asking. No idea it’s the exact wound. No idea his daughter spent seven days three years ago waiting to answer a worse version of it through a door. I keep all of it off my face. I keep it in the vault where it’s lived since she handed it to me in the dark, because it’s hers, and it stays hers, even here, even in the one room on earth where saying it might help me.
“No, sir.”
“Are you here to ask for her hand?” His tone is flat. A man in a foul mood who has decided he is not in the market for whatever I brought.
“No, sir. Not that.”
“Then sit down and tell me what you’re doing all the way over here.”
“I’ll be straight with you up front, Coach, I’ve got a red-eye back tonight. Practice in the morning, a class I can’t miss. I flew in to do this, and I’m flying right back out, so I’m not going to waste your night or dress anything up.” I take the chair across from him, since he’s tipped his head at it. “But I need to tell you the truth, and I needed to do it in person.”
Carolyn comes in with a glass, sets it by me, and doesn’t leave. She perches on the arm of her husband’s chair. Whatever this is, she’s decided she’s in it. Good. She should be.
So I tell him.
The kitchen. The party. The deal. The rules. The whole architecture of it, laid flat for the man it fooled hardest — no bit, no softening, undefended in a way that’s even worse here than it was on the phone with my own father, because this is Coach Linwood, and because the lie I’m confessing has his daughter’s fingerprints on it too, and I’m the one putting them in the light.
I tell him it was never real. That it started fake and ran fake for weeks, in front of him, in front of all of them.
And then I land it where it has to land.
“She broke it off with me on Friday,” I say. “And I’m here to make it right, Coach. That’s why I got on a plane.”
Bart Linwood does not move.
That’s the thing about the man, the thing that’s terrifying about him — his face doesn’t do what other faces do. It goes still and stays still, and you sit there trying to read it and finding nothing on it. It is so much worse than being yelled at. He takes a slow drink and sets it down.
“Do you love my daughter?”
That hits me in the gut, but I don’t hesitate. “I do.”
“But she broke up with you.” A pause. “Fakebroke up with you.”
“Yeah.”
“So why are you in my house?” Not unkind. Just direct, a coach cutting straight to the tape. “If it’s fake and it’s over, son, why’d you get on a plane?”
“Because I needed you to hear it from me, in person, that I turned down Halifax for my own reasons.” I hold his eyes. “Not for her. Mine.”
That gets a flicker. Finally. It’s the first one.
“Thought the NHL was the whole point,” he says. “Thought that was always the goal.”
“It is. I’m going. I’ll go when it’s time.”
“That’s a rookie move, Stanley.” Flat, but he’s engaged now, leaning the way he leans on a bench. “You don’t tell the league not yet. You don’t keep an NHL club waiting on a college kid’s feelings.”
“I understand, Coach. But—”
“You could win a Cup. You hear me? Halifax is smart to want you up now — they’re not wrong about you, and a window like that doesn’t sit open and wait. And you’re telling me you’d rather have — what? College championships?”
