Page 113 of Her Coach

I stood at the edge of the ice for a while without doing anything in particular.

This was his. This whole place. He’d built it with Mom and left it to her and she’d kept it alive for years on nothing but stubbornness and grief and love that had nowhere else to go. And somehow it had ended up being mine too, in the way things become yours when you grow up inside them. I’d never planned to be here. English Lit degree. College professor. The book about loss that I’d been not-writing for six years. None of those plans included this ice, this city, this team.

But Dad’s plans hadn’t included leaving early, either.

Maybe plans were just the stories you told yourself before your real life showed up.

“You’re in early.”

Colton’s voice came from somewhere behind me and to the left, and I didn’t startle the way I would have two months ago. I’d already learned the sound of him moving. Heavy, deliberate, rubber soles on concrete. The kind of man who always knew where he was going.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.

He came to stand beside me at the boards. Close enough that his arm pressed against mine. He didn’t say anything, which was one of the things I’d decided I loved about him — that he could be quiet without making the quiet into something that needed filling.

We looked at the ice together.

“Rhett was at my mom’s last night,” I said.

A beat. “I know. He texted me.”

I looked up at him. “He texted you?”

“Said he was going to be late to morning skate. Didn’t say why.” The corner of his mouth moved. “I figured it out.”

I turned back to the ice. “She’s going to be a nightmare about it.”

“Probably.”

“She’ll convince herself it was nothing. She’ll put twelve layers of practical explanation between herself and whatever she actually felt, and then she’ll come in here and be insufferable about inventory or something.”

“Also probably.”

“And Rhett will just —” I stopped.

“Keep showing up?” Colton offered.

“Yeah.” I exhaled. “Yeah, he will.”

I’d spent so much energy trying to build something for my mother. Trying to find the right man, the right situation, the right angle of approach. And the whole time Rhett had just been there, in her orbit, patient in the uncalculated way young men sometimes were — not because they were trying to be, just because they hadn’t yet learned to hedge. I hadn’t engineered it. I hadn’t even seen it coming. It had just happened the way the best things happened, quietly, while everyone was looking somewhere else.

I felt Colton’s hand find mine at the boards. He didn’t make a thing of it. Just laced his fingers through mine and stood there.

“She’s going to be okay,” he said. Not a question.

“I know.” I squeezed his hand. “I think I’ve known for a while. I just needed to stop being the one in charge of it.”

The ice stretched out in front of us, fresh and unmarked. Jimbo hadn’t brought the Zamboni out yet. In an hour it would be full of noise and blades and Jett doing something inadvisable near the boards while Rhett yelled at him about it. The season was three games old and we’d won two of them, and somewhere across town my mother had a man who knew how she took her coffee and wasn’t going anywhere.

I thought about the book I’d never written. The one about grief, about kids who lost their parents too soon, about the part nobody told you where you had to figure out how to stop carrying it as your whole personality. I thought about what it would feel like to actually sit down and write it. Not someday. Not once things settled. Now.

“Hey,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“When you said I could go anywhere.” I tilted my head up to look at him. “I want to stay here. I just — I want to stay here and also write the book. I want both things.”

He looked at me for a long moment. “Then have both things.”