Page 322 of Power Play

“You believe me?”

Briggs looked at me. “That you’re done?”

“Yeah.”

“I believed you in the group chat.”

“Everyone else thinks I’m angry.”

“You are angry.”

“They think it’ll burn out.”

Briggs studied the blood on my hand. “It will.”

My jaw tightened.

“The anger will,” he clarified. “Your decision doesn’t have to.”

I stared at him.

“You didn’t end it because you stopped loving her. You ended it because loving her stopped being safe.”

The words entered every fractured place inside me. I lowered my head while Briggs sat beside me and allowed the truth to settle.

He didn’t tell me safety could be rebuilt. He offered no timeline for healing and didn’t suggest Charm might become someone different.

Love hadn’t saved my mother. It hadn’t kept my father alive through his overdose. It hadn’t stopped foster parents from deciding I was too angry, too Mexican, too old, too mean, too damaged, or too fucking attractive.

Love had never stopped anybody from hurting me.

Charm taught me how badly it could hurt when I finally believed it might.

“I don’t know who I am without her anymore.”

Briggs slowly turned his stick between his gloves. “You don’t have to know tonight.”

“I knew before.”

“You knew how to survive before.”

“Same thing.”

“No.”

The answer came quietly, but my temper was too exhausted to rise again.

Briggs leaned his helmet against the glass beside him. “Surviving is what you do when somebody takes everything and leaves you with a body that keeps breathing anyway. It isn’t the same as having a life.”

“I had a life.”

“You had hockey and the drive of a madman.”

“I had a life before her.”

Briggs didn’t agree, and I hated him for that too.

My phone vibrated from the bench. My entire body reacted before my mind caught up, my head snapping toward the sound and my heart slamming against my ribs as though Charm had somehow found a way around the block.