I stand in the empty room for a second.
The grin held.
I’m almost sure the grin held.
Chapter 24
Aspen
Monday, my life is waiting for me exactly where I left it, and it doesn’t fit anymore.
This is the thing no one warns you about. You can go away for a few days and come home to find every object in your home exactly where you left it — the coffee where the coffee lives, the laptop in the same place from Wednesday night, the whole careful machine of your life still ticking — and the only thing that’s changed is you, which means none of it fits, because the person it was all built around isn’t the one who walked back through the door.
I have a call Tuesday — the org’s analytics group, my numbers, my read on a Western Conference team I’ve been tracking since training camp. I’m behind on my master’s application because I gave a weekend to Connecticut, and now the writing sample sits at two-thirds done and judging me. So I open the work and let it sort my insides into columns. Work has never once let me down. And it doesn’t let me down now, either. The numbers behave. The deck builds. The sentences come.
It just doesn’t fill the room the way it used to.
I keep drifting.
And every time I drift, I drift to the same place. The note.
It’s on my desk, propped against the base of the lamp, where I set it the night I got back and have left it every day since. A torn square of my mother’s grocery notepad, five words on it in handwriting I would know anywhere now.
I’ll make you another pie.
I found it the morning he flew out, back in Connecticut — sitting on top of my father’s oxford, folded over the back of my old vanity chair with the tie laid across it. He was already gone when I woke up. States between us by the time I woke up. I left the shirt folded on the chair for my dad. But I stole the note off the top of it and put it in my coat pocket. I carried it back home into my real life, and I have not thrown it away.
I watched the game on Friday. I have the entire professional vocabulary for what he did out there. I could write it up clean — the forecheck pressure, the two turnovers he forced below the dots that turned into goals, the plus-three, the gap control that doesn’t land anywhere on a stat sheet. I could put eleven pages next to anybody’s coffee on exactly what Stanley Ermington did to a ranked team on no sleep.
But there’s a thing underneath the vocabulary that doesn’t go in a report.
He played furious.
I know furious. I have watched a thousand hockey games, and I can tell the difference between a man who’s locked in and a man who is burning something off. FridayandSaturday, he was burning something off, every single shift, and I think I know exactly what it was.
It was mine. I handed it to him on Thursday. The worst week of my life laid out flat for the first time in three years. And the very next night, he carried it out onto the ice under a nationalbroadcast and skated it into the boards, shift after shift, and the announcers called it a breakout, a draft-stock riser, and a statement game.
I set it down the way he taught me.
It doesn’t stay down. That’s the part of the lesson he left out — that whatever a guy thinks about you is his, not yours, works fine on a stranger’s opinion, and not at all on this. You can put what people think of you on the floor and walk away from it. You cannot put I watched him bleed for me on television anywhere that it’ll stay.
On my phone, I opened his name twice that weekend.
The first time I got as far as the empty message box, and I had nothing to put in it because every word I’ve ever said to this man has been required by our little arrangement.
The second time, I typed, good game. I looked at it for a long minute and deleted it one letter at a time. I don’t know how to start a conversation with him, so I don’t.
On Wednesday, I received a text message I wasn’t expecting.
Gianna: Let’s have lunch on Friday. You, me, and Lucy.
Gianna Reeve. Benson’s younger sister — louder than him by a lot, the kind of girl who knows how to have fun and is outgoing. I’ve known her for years, and we’ve hung out a few times, so this friendly text message isn’t that bizarre. I’ve even gone to a Hawthorne House party with her friend group.
My first instinct when I read the text message is to dodge her and steer clear. I am not a girl-lunch person. I have never been a girl-lunch person. I don’t have a group. I’ve never had a group. I have my roommates and a best friend from high school, but that’s it. I’m the contained one. The one who doesn’t get the invite. The one who made sure, a long time ago, that she’d never need the invite, so that not getting it could never mean anything.
And right behind the dodge, the old reflex — the same one the toast tripped. They’re asking because of him. This is a courtesy.This is the thing the girlfriend gets, folded into the group the way a new hire gets added to the birthday list — a function of the boyfriend, not a person in her own right. They’re being kind to Stanley Ermington’s girlfriend. The lie has gone and earned me a social life I did not earn myself, and it stings in the exact way my father’s toast stung. I’m being handed something for entirely the wrong reason.
And then — and I want to be honest about how small this is, and how enormous — I accept anyway.
