Mira said, “I know.”
“You know? How did you—” I stopped. “Did he tell you?”
“No.But I know Knox. And I know you. And I know that a man would keep a secret like that because he thought he was protecting you.”
“I don’t want to be protected,” I said. “I want to be trusted.”
Mira said, “I know, baby. I know.”
I sat down at my own counter and I understood that I was going to have to tell Knox to go. That I was going to have to send him away. That I was going to have to spend some time alone with my anger before I could figure out whether there was any forgiveness waiting on the other side of it.
I called Maddox’s office. Maddox’s assistant answered. I left a message: “Tell him I don’t want to see him tonight.”
And then I sat in my diner and I waited for evening to come. I waited for Knox to arrive at my door. I waited for the moment when I would have to tell him that I knew, and that knowing was not the same as forgiving, and that he had broken something that I did not yet understand how to fix.
The diner closed at 7 p.m. I flipped the sign and I did not turn it back on. I sat in the dark with the coffee maker hissing and the propane heater running and I thought about all the versions of this moment I had imagined. In some of them, Knox arrived and I told him and he apologized and everything went back to the way it was. In others, I told him to leave and he never came back.
But this version—the version where I was sitting alone in my grandmother’s diner, waiting for a man to arrive so I could tell him that I knew he had lied—this version was worse than all the others. This version meant that I had to hold the anger without release. This version meant that I had to wait and wait and understand that the waiting was not going to change anything.
I thought about the reporter. I thought about how the secret was about to become public. I thought about how by tomorrow, the whole town would probably know that AFC Holdings was betting on the diner’s survival. I thought about how Knox’s choice to keep me in the dark meant that I was going to find out in the worst possible way.
I thought about driving to Maddox’s house and demanding answers. I thought about calling Knox and telling him everything right now, before he had a chance to prepare. I thought about letting the anger out of the box and never putting it back.
But instead, I sat in the dark and I waited. I sat in the diner that my grandmother had built and that someone else had saved and that I was somehow supposed to keep alive. I sat in the dark and I thought about what it meant to love someone who did not trust you with the truth of your own life.
And I understood that forgiveness, if it came, was going to be a very long time in arriving.
18
KNOX
Idrove from the rink to Maple’s house in a state of particular numbness. I had known this was coming. I had been counting down to it since Maddox told me to wait, since I had decided to keep the secret, since I had allowed my silence to grow between us like a living thing.
The drive took seven minutes. The sky was dark. The snow was falling in that particular way that Minnesota snow fell at the end of February—soft and relentless and indifferent to whether anyone was ready for it. I had spent two years moving through snow and cold and the particular kind of grief that came from losing the one thing you had been defined by. I had spent two years being the man who had retired. The man who had hung up my gloves. The man who would never play again.
And then Maple had walked into my life and she had made me want to be someone different. Someone who could stay. Someone who could tell the truth. Someone who could be the kind of man that a woman like that deserved.
But instead, I had become the man who kept secrets.
The porch light was on. The house was dark behind it. I sat in my truck in the driveway and I understood that I was about to lose something. I had known it was coming. I had been waiting for it since Day 15. And now it was here and I had no idea how to fix it.
I was at her front door at 8:47 p.m.
I had spent the day at the rink, working with goalies, doing the work that was my job and my excuse, the thing that kept me moving forward when all I wanted to do was sit in the apartment and wait for her to forgive me. I had taken three calls from Maddox. I had ignored two. The third one I had answered, and Maddox had told me that Maple had come to the office, had asked the questions, had left a message:Tell him I do not want to see him tonight.
I understood the message.
I had come anyway.
I knocked on the door at 8:47 p.m., and it took her thirty-two seconds to open it. I counted. I stood on the porch and I counted the seconds like they mattered, like each one was a moment she was deciding whether to let me in or slam the door in my face, whether to forgive me or whether to make me wait, whether to love me or whether to release me.
She opened the door.
She did not step back to let me in. She stood in the doorway like a barrier, like a woman who understood that a door could also be a wall.
I said, “I need to tell you?—”
She said, “There is no right moment to tell a woman you bought her debt.”
