He pulls me in then, both arms around me, my face against his neck, the cold of the rink pressing in from all sides. He smells like ice and effort and the specific version of himself that exists before anyone else arrives in the morning.
“The evaluation is in eight days,” he says into my hair.
“Okay.”
“I don’t know how it’s going to go.”
“I know.”
“The team can’t know yet. If it gets out—”
“It won’t.” I pull back enough to look at him. “But Bennett. You are going to walk into that evaluation and you are going to be exactly who you are now. Not who you were on Main Street. Now. The man who can name what he’s feeling and ask for help and show up for people and trust his team to execute a play at four wins from a playoff spot.” I hold his gaze. “That man is going to be fine.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you.” I touch his face. “That’s enough.”
He closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them something has shifted—not fixed, not resolved, but lighter. The way things get when you’ve been carrying them alone and someone puts their hands on the other side.
“I should have come up,” he says.
“Yes.”
“I’ll come up next time.”
“Yes, you will.” I step back. Find my footing on the ice. “Now go finish your skating. Practice starts in two hours, and you look like you’ve been out here since before Virgil finished the ice.”
“Since ten.”
“Bennett.”
“I know.” He picks up his stick. “Gisele.”
I’m already moving toward the gate. “Yeah?”
“Thank you for coming.”
I look back at him—this man, on this ice, in this building that has been his whole world for years, standing a little less alone than he was an hour ago.
“That’s what I do,” I say.
I walk back across the ice without falling.
It feels like a metaphor. I let it be one.
Everything To Lose
Bennett
There’s a moment, after all the noise and fear and late-night spiraling, when the only thing left to do is walk in and tell the truth. No performance. No armor. Just the quiet certainty that you’ve already done the hardest part—the part where you changed. And whether anyone else recognizes it or not almost stops mattering, because youdo. You can feel it in your hands, steady when they used to shake. In your choices, simple where they used to be complicated. And maybe the real win isn’t what happens after the evaluation. Maybe it’s the fact that you were ready for it at all.
Playlist: “Stubborn Love” by The Lumineers
The house is quiet in a way it hasn’t been in a while.
Boone left at seven for dinner with Brogan and Joely, which had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that Boone has his own life and has been quietly, generously sharing his house with my emotional crisis for two months without complaint. I heard him leave. Heard the truck back out. Watched the headlights sweep across the ceiling of my room and then disappear.
The evaluation is tomorrow at nine AM.
