“He doesn’t need my dad.” It’s out a half-beat too fast and a notch too hard, pitched just above the register the room is running at. “He doesn’t need anyone. He’s that good on his own, and he’ll cross every inch of that gap on his own, and in five years not one of you is going to remember whose daughter he happened to show up to dinner with.”
The little circle goes quiet.
Not a bad quiet. A noticing one.
Mac’s eyebrows go up, and something that’s almost approval moves across his face. “There you go,” he says.
Hodge gestures at me with his beer. “She wrote forty pages on his zone entries. She’d know.”
“Twelve,” I correct, before I can get a hand over my own mouth.
And the moment breaks up into laughter, the way these moments do, and the talk folds back over the top of it, and Hodge is already off into a complaint about Western Conference travel.
Stanley leans in. There’s no grin on him now at all. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“I can take it, Linwood. I’ve got broad shoulders. Ask around.”
I look at my wine. “I didn’t do it for you.”
I just defended him to two men with nine hundred NHL games between them as though it were my own name they’d put a doubt in front of. I felt the whole thing — the heat, the tightening, the flatno, you don’t get to say that about him— a clear second before I made any decision to feel it. It surfaced on its own, fully grown, out ahead of my permission.
I did exactly what I told myself I wouldn’t do. I cared what they thought.
I drink my wine instead of going looking for the reason.
It’s late, or what counts as late in a house that started drinking at two in the afternoon. I’ve put almost nothing in my body all day, and the wine is the only thing in me with any weight to it, so I finally cut myself half a slice of the infamous pie and put a forkful of it in my mouth.
It’s good. It is stupidly, unreasonably good — the kind of good that makes you a little angry on its behalf.
“Oh my God,” I say, before any responsible part of my brain gets a vote. “Rowan makes the best pumpkin pie.”
Stanley’s hand closes over my forearm. “Shh.”
He cuts a fast, theatrical glance across the room toward my aunt.
“What are you doing?” he hisses. “Trying to blow our cover? Do you understand what’s at stake?”
I lean into his shoulder, and I’m laughing, properly laughing now, into the navy cotton of my father’s shirt on a man who is not my father.
“We have to protect my image here,” he manages.
“I think they all know.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Your mom wants the recipe, so now I have to hunt Rowan down before she’s onto me.”
He plucks the fork from my fingers and takes a bite. His brows shoot up. “Wow.”
I take my fork back. “Get your own slice.”
He leans in, pushing me over a little too much. I grab his arm to brace myself, and he flexes under my palm, so I roll my eyes and push him back. He laughs, catching himself.
“Okay. I knew you had it in you,” he says.
I look up.
He’s already looking at me.
