Rhys saidokayand stepped back and gave me room and he's lying in his bed feeling like shit and I'm lying here and I'm choosing this. I'm choosing the wall. I'm choosing the version of myself my father helped build because it's the only version I trust to survive what's coming.
Being around Rhys feels like standing too close to the edge of something dangerous and wanting to jump anyway. I know that. I am choosing not to jump, with full awareness, and I hate myself for it in a way that feels completely irreversible and I do it anyway.
I don’t trust myself around him anymore.
Because I am my father's son.
Because the stick worked.
Because somewhere between a locked door and an empty rink and twenty-one years of being exactly what I was made to be, I forgot that I was allowed to want something different.
Or maybe I never knew.
Maybe I never knew.
The ceiling is very white. The room is very quiet.
My phone screen stays dark.
It doesn't feel like strength. It just feels like the door locking again.
From the outside.
Chapter 47
Jamie — Past
I tell myself I'm going because it's the right thing to do. He's sick. He's your father so you go. Simple. Clean. Nothing underneath it worth examining.
The house looks the same when I pull in.
That's the first thing. I don't know what I expected — some visible mark of what's happening inside, something different, something that matches the weight of it — but it's just the house. Same shutters. Same front walk cracked along the left side where a tree root got under it years ago and nobody ever fixed it. My mom's car in the driveway. A neighbor's trash cans at the curb. Ordinary afternoon.
I sit in the car with the engine off. I am not doing anything. Just sitting. Hands in my lap, looking at the front door, waiting for whatever this feeling is to resolve itself into something more controllable before I have to go inside.
I don't let myself look at it too closely.
The feeling.
Of relief.
I go inside.
My mom answers before I knock.
She looks smaller. Or I feel bigger. Or this doorway has always made both of us smaller than we actually are, like Alice in Wonderland. She hugs me and I let her and she holds on the way she has been holding on my whole life — briefly, like sheknows better than to show too much.
"He's awake," she says. "It's a good day."
I nod. She takes my coat. She asks if I want coffee and I say yes because it gives her something to do and giving her something to do is the kindest thing I know how to offer her. I follow her to the kitchen and I look at the photos on the hallway wall — hockey photos mostly, only the ones that look like achievements, the ones my father approved — and I don't stop walking.
She hands me the coffee and I carry it to his room.
The door is open.
I stop in the doorway for a moment before he sees me.
He's in the bed — their bed, the same frame they've had since before I was born — and he is smaller. That is the only word for it. The man who has dominated every room he has ever walked into, who lowered the temperature of a house just by being in it, who I have spent my entire life arranging myself around — he is just smaller. Yellow around the eyes. Hands wrong on the blanket. The diminishment of a body that is failing at the job of keeping someone alive.
