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He has to go. It’s his dream.

Like that made it simpler instead of worse.

I remembered the cab idling at the curb, exhaust ghosting up into the cold October air, the driver pointedly not looking at any of us.

I remembered my father’s eyes over her shoulder, steady, giving me permission and instruction in the same look.

Get in the car, Maxim.

Not unkind.

Just certain, the way he’d been certain about everything, right up until he wasn’t anymore.

I got in the car.

I looked back once through the rear window, and she was still standing in the driveway in her housecoat, my father’s arms around her. Even from that distance, even through glass and exhaust and the growing gap of pavement between us, I could see that whatever was breaking in her wasn’t going to mend itself just because I’d left.

Two days later, my billet family’s phone rang at six in the morning, and I knew before anyone said a word, the way you knew when a puck was going in the net a half-second before it crossed the line.

Full bottle.

She hadn’t left a note, or if she had, nobody ever showed it to me.

My father told me over the phone in a voice with nothing left in it at all, and I stood in a stranger’s kitchen in Quebec, still four days from my first training camp scrimmage, and understood for the first time what it meant to be loved by someone too much.

I understood it the way you understood a scar—by tracing the shape of the thing that made it.

I’d known since I was around eight what being a lifebound dragon meant, ever since my parents had been forced to homeschool me because two boys got into a fistfight over who got to sit next to me in class.

And that had only been the tip of the iceberg.

Except I’d never fully understood the effect I’d had on Mama.

Fifteen years of hockey had passed since then, and I’d never once let myself forget what that kind of love did to the people who carried it.

What it had done to her.

What it could do to anyone who let themselves love me back that hard.

How I destroyed people.

I kept my hand at my own stall, unlacing skates I didn’t need to look at, and didn’t let myself look at Ash again until he’d already gone quiet and still, staring at nothing, boot half off, like some vital piece of him was still standing back there in that tunnel.

“We’re going to Murphy’s,” Baelor announced to the room at large, tugging a shirt over his head like the matter had already been settled. “Coach said three days before we fly out, and I am not spending the first night of that staring at my own ceiling. Team bonding. Non-negotiable.”

“Since when do you make the rules?” Cole asked, but he was already reaching for his jacket, and that was how I knew it was decided.

Cole didn’t do anything he didn’t want to do.

If he was in, it was happening.

“Since he said so,” Keegan chimed in, and it wasn’t quite the easy grin from before the tunnel, but it was close enough that some of the tightness in the room eased with it. “Taz. You’re driving.”

“I am not your chauffeur,” Taz said mildly, already pulling his hair back into its loose braid, which everyone in the room correctly interpreted as agreement.

I glanced over at Ash without meaning to.

He had one boot off, one still on, and he hadn’t moved in the better part of a minute.