Page 415 of Power Play

To the only home I remembered having, and then I went to see my mother. What happened between us at her grave was nobody’s fucking business.

“I told you where I was going.”

“You told me after the plane landed.”

“I wasn’t asking permission.”

“No one said you needed permission.” His jaw flexed. “We needed to know you were alive.”

“I answered every time you called.”

“After I threatened to report you missing.”

“You’re dramatic.”

“And you’re an asshole.”

“That isn’t new.”

“No.” He wrapped one hand around his beer without lifting it. “This is.”

I looked away before he could find anything on my face that I didn’t want to explain.

The Sin Bin had never been quiet with all of us inside it. We filled this place with noise, shouting across tables, fighting over music, and breaking up arguments before someone lost teeth. We celebrated wins as if we would never lose again and survived losses by acting as though none of us cared.

Tonight, I could hear the refrigeration unit humming behind the bar.

My eyes moved through the room, finding the stool near the far end of the bar, the hallway beside the bathrooms, and the small table Charm used to claim whenever she came in with Bliss and Aura.

She was everywhere.

I’d seen her here for years before I was ready to approach her with intention. I knew the sound of her laugh before I understood what made her cry. I knew how she took her drinks, which songs made her sing beneath her breath, and that she always pushed her hair behind her ear before telling someone something she believed mattered.

The night I finally crossed the room, she sat at the bar wearing her worry with her mouth stained the color of dark cherries. She looked up when I stopped beside her, and the nervous smile she gave me made every carefully planned word disappear.

You are Kierkegaard.

I closed my eyes until the memory faded, but opening them only returned me to the room where every part of my life had collided. Cade was watching me. Bliss held his hand beneath the table. Aura had stopped pretending she wasn’t studying my face, and Easton’s fingers remained against her shoulder like he already sensed whatever was coming.

I couldn’t sit there anymore.

The chair scraped across the floor when I pushed away from the table and stood. Every person around it went still.

“I can’t do this here.”

Cade rose halfway. “Do what?”

“This.” I gestured toward the room with my good hand. “Sit inside every fucking memory and pretend leaving is only about hockey.”

Nobody answered.

I turned toward the bar and dragged a hand across my mouth. “She’s in my apartment. She’s at the rink, the coffee shop, the Book Nook, and on every road between here and Flint. She’s in this fucking bar even when I know she isn’t. I see her in places she’s never been because I spent months imagining taking her there.”

My voice started breaking, and I hated that I couldn’t stop it.

“I can’t breathe without running into some version of the life I thought we were going to have. I can’t buy coffee without remembering what she ordered. I can’t open a book without hearing her argue about the ending. I can’t sleep in my own bed because I still wake up reaching for her, and every morning I have to remember all over again that she isn’t there.”

Cade straightened completely. Briggs’s chair shifted behind me, but he didn’t approach.