Page 35
The headlines practically wrote themselves.
Max was still talking when the memory finally released me enough for the room to come back into focus. He was telling me about his father and the years afterward, about the guilt he'd carried and all the things neither of them had ever managed to forgive.
I watched him and realized that Max carried guilt because his mother had died, but he hadn’t killed her.
“Ash?”
I blinked and found him watching me, concern replacing some of the pain that had been in his expression moments before.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
The lie came so easily that I barely noticed saying it.
Max frowned, but I looked away before he could see anything else.
I hadn't watched the video in years because there was no reason to. I could replay every second whenever I closed my eyes, from my sneaker catching against the stone to my hands hitting Mom's back and her body pitching forward.
Most of all, I remembered Dad's finger against the screen, tapping the frozen image.
You pushed her.
Nearly twenty years later, I could still remember the feel of Mom's coat beneath my palms, and every month when Dad's message arrived with the amount he wanted, I paid it.
I didn't care about the money anymore. I cared about what would happen if he kept his promise.
The Dragons would see the video. The league would see it. The entire world would see it.
Max would see it.
He would watch seven-year-old me come up behind my mother and put both hands against her back seconds before she fell to her death.
Max had just trusted me with the most painful thing that had ever happened to him, and I couldn't even give him the truth in return.
Because Max's mother had taken her own life.
I’d as good as murdered mine.
And I couldn't bear to find out whether Max would ever look at me the same way again if he knew.
Chapter eight
Slot - The prime scoring area directly in front of the goal, between the faceoff circles.
Max
Ash was still standing in front of me when his phone started vibrating in his pocket.
The sound was quiet, barely more than a low mechanical buzz beneath the hum of the hotel air-conditioning, but I felt the change in him before he even reached for it. His shoulders tightened, and the softness that had been there while he held me disappeared so quickly that I wondered if I had imagined it.
He pulled the phone out, looked at the screen, and declined the call.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
The answer came too quickly to be convincing, but I had already spent enough of the last few days trying to force open doors he clearly intended to keep closed. I was beginning to understand that pushing harder only made him barricade them more thoroughly, so I nodded and let it go.
