Page 27 of Double Puck

Here I am, thinking my whole life is some tragic underdog story—the forgotten baby brother, the afterthought—and this woman spends her childhood color-coded onto somebody’s calendar between piano and French lessons.

We grow up in completely different worlds and somehow end up in the same place.

She gets the perfect house where even fun arrives at an agreed time and leaves before the next lesson. I get a house with too many people in it, but there’s never enough room left for me.

That's the thing nobody in my family has ever realized.

Declan and Mason were always there first. First out on the ice. First on a team. First to be taken seriously. By the time I showed up with a stick in my hands, the roles were already handed out.

And then there was me, the kid chasing them with one skate half-laced, screaming at them to wait up. Eventually you stop chasing. You just get faster. You get louder. You figure out that if you can't be first, you can at least be impossible to ignore.

I glance around the café as the morning rush starts spilling out onto the boardwalk.

"You know what I think?" I point my fork at Darcy. “You would’ve been useful in our house. You’d have kept records of who won the last race."

Darcy goes strangely still. "Oh really?"

"Absolutely. You could have gathered evidence for me. Exposed Declan’s corruption.”

She takes a sip. “I could have developed a fair scoring system.”

“You’d have been drunk on power within a week," I say, laughing.

She steals a piece of my French toast without a word, and I watch her lips close around it. Her tongue darts out to catch a crumb, and I nearly groan out loud.

“So your brothers got you into hockey?” Darcy asks, licking caramel from one finger.

“Yeah, I guess.” I slide my plate closer to her, just in case she has decided my sugar loading isn’t so bad after all. “I annoyed them until they gave me a stick. What about you? Did one of the Madden hotels come with its own rink?”

“Almost.” Her mouth curves. “My mother took me to a Canucks game when I was twelve. Someone gave her tickets during a hotel opening in Vancouver.”

“And that was it?”

“For her? Yes. She hated the noise.” Darcy circles one finger around the rim of her coffee. “I loved it.”

“What part?”

“All of it. The speed. The crowd screaming words I'd never heard before.” Her smile turns almost dreamy. “I just fell in love with the fact that nobody sat straight. Nobody waited politely. It was just… complete chaos.”

I lean back. “And little Darcy Madden took one look at total chaos and thought, Yes. That’s for me.”

“Much to my mother's disgust.”

“So how do you go from one game to creating reports that get handsome, beloved men traded?”

“I watched every game I could find. Read books. Started recording plays in a notebook.” She shrugs like teaching herself an entire sport to escape her perfect world is normal. “The numbers helped me understand why the chaos worked.”

“Did your parents hire someone to teach you?”

“God, no. They didn't understand it.” Her chin lifts slightly. “Hockey was the first thing I chose before they had the chance to choose it for me.”

"Jesus, Darcy. I had to have my agent walk me through my first contract in terms that didn't make me want to lie down on the ice and stop moving. And the man charges me a percentage for that."

"Yeah, well. That's just how it was."

I nod with interest, finally starting to understand the perfect façade sitting in front of me.

Ballet, piano and French belong on Darcy’s schedule.