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Admittedly, they were deteriorating.

Chapter twenty-four

Stick Tap - A traditional hockey gesture of respect or appreciation, made by tapping a stick against the ice, boards, or another surface. Often used to acknowledge a teammate, an opponent, or someone the hockey community wants to honor.

Ash

The ceremony took eleven minutes.

There were no stories about what kind of man my father had been, no photographs arranged on easels, and no attempt to turn a lifetime of anger and fear into something softer simply because he’d died. The minister said a few words while I stood beside Max, and a man I’d spent eight years trying to escape was reduced to a polished wooden box and a handful of carefully chosen sentences before the ceremony quietly ended.

I’d wondered whether seeing the coffin would make something happen.

Maybe grief would finally arrive once there was something physical in front of me, or perhaps guilt would become stronger because death had made forgiveness impossible. Instead, as the minister spoke about endings and peace without pretending to know the man we were burying, I found myself thinking about my mother.

For once, I didn’t think about the fall.

I didn’t see the stairs or the terrible seconds my father had cut and rearranged until they became the only version of that day I believed.

I remembered her getting me out of the apartment.

She’d taken me down that fire escape because she wanted something better for us, and somewhere along the way my father had managed to make her death so enormous that it swallowed the courage that came before it. He’d taught me to remember the moment I lost her instead of the reason we’d been on those stairs in the first place.

My mother had been trying to save me.

Knowing that didn’t make losing her hurt less, but it gave me something back that my father had stolen almost twenty years ago.

She had loved me enough to leave.

When the minister finished, I remained where I was for another few seconds while people began moving quietly behind us. Max’s hand stayed around mine, and he didn’t ask whether I wanted him there because by now we were past pretending there was anything important either of us would face alone.

I looked at the coffin one final time.

“I don’t forgive you.”

Max didn’t react, and neither did the minister standing several feet away, because the words weren’t for either of them.

For most of my life, I’d believed forgiveness was supposed to be the finish line, as though surviving what someone did to you eventually created an obligation to make peace with them.

I didn’t feel peaceful.

I didn’t forgive my father for terrifying my mother, lying to a seven-year-old child, stealing from me for years, or deliberately making me believe I’d killed the person I loved most in the world.

Death hadn’t changed any of that. It had simply ended his ability to do anything else.

“I don’t hate you enough to carry you anymore either.”

That felt closer to the truth.

I let out a breath and turned away from the grave.

That was when I realized Max wasn’t the only person standing with me.

Theron and Cinder were there, along with Taz, Cole, Phoenix, Dante, Baelor, and Tyson. The rest of the team. Behind them stood coaches and trainers, equipment staff and medical personnel, people from communications and travel, members of the front office whose names I barely knew, and even Martha from payroll, who’d once spent twenty minutes helping me fix a tax form I’d screwed up.

There had to be fifty people standing in that cemetery for a man almost none of them had ever met.

Nobody offered some meaningless platitude about my father being in a better place or tried to tell me he must have loved me in his own way. Nobody suggested death erased what he’d done or that blood created an obligation to mourn him.