The answer surfaces before I can stop it.
Celine.
The name alone makes my chest tight. I don’t think about her often. I’ve trained myself not to think about her for years. But tonight, with Winnie’s touch still burning on my skin, the memories push through anyway.
Celine and Don Nickerson. The last family. The one that almost kept me.
I was fourteen when I landed with them—angry, closed-off, convinced it was only a matter of time before they sent me back like everyone else. I’d been through four placements by then. I knew the drill: be quiet, stay out of the way, don’t get attached.
But Celine made it hard not to get attached.
She was soft in a way I didn’t trust at first—always smiling, always checking in. She’d ruffle my hair when she passed me in the kitchen, hug me and tell me I was a good kid even when I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. She made me lunch every morning—packed in a brown paper bag with my name written on the front in her careful handwriting.
No one had ever done those small things for me.
Don drove me back and forth to the ice arena, never once complaining about it. For two years, I let myself believe it might stick. That maybe, finally, I’d found somewhere to stay.
Then I turned sixteen, and Don got transferred to a job three states away. They couldn’t take me with them—something about jurisdiction, paperwork, the foster system’s endless red tape. Celinecried when she told me. Actually cried. Like losing me meant something.
“We’ll figure it out,” she kept saying. “We’ll find a way.”
But they didn’t find a way. They moved. I got shuffled to a group home. And I learned, once and for all, that people leave. Even the good ones. Even the ones who mean it when they say they’ll stay.
I haven’t let anyone touch me like Celine used to since. Haven’t let anyone close enough to try.
Until tonight.
Until Winnie stood in that hallway and reached for my face and brushed her fingertips over my jaw.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table, startling me out of the memory. I grab it, expecting a text from Zayden or some team group chat nonsense.
It’s Winnie.
But she’s not texting. She’s calling.
I stare at the screen for two rings, three, before I answer.
“Hello?”
“Hey.” Her voice is warm, a little sleepy. “Did I wake you?”
“No.”
“Good. I just wanted to check in. How’s the lip?”
“Fine.”
A pause. Then, amused, “You know, normal people use more than one word on phone calls too.”
“Oh.” I pause. “Right. It’s fine, thanks.”
She laughs—that bright, easy sound that does something complicated to my chest. “Hilarious. You’re a real comedian, Banks.”
“I try.”
“Seriously, though. Does it hurt? I saw you take that punch, and it looked… bad.”
“I’ve had worse.”
