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I could pull some of it from savings, but the transfer limit wouldn't cover everything. Selling investments wouldn't clear by midnight, and calling my financial adviser to request an unusually large withdrawal would inevitably produce exactly the sort of questions I had no intention of answering.

Was I buying something? Had there been an emergency?

My father had discovered I was falling for someone, and apparently that qualified as a financial emergency now.

I closed the app and rubbed both hands over my face.

The money wasn't even the worst part. If Dad had simply demanded more, I would've found a way to pay it because that was what I'd always done. He threatened, I paid, and then I got to pretend for another month that the past was buried deeply enough to stay there.

Except he'd changed the rules.

Or I send it to him first.

I picked up my phone before I could stop myself and opened Max's message again.

Home. Hope you're okay.

My thumb hovered over the screen while I considered several replies, none of them remotely useful.

I'm sorry felt pathetic.

I wasn't feeling great was such an obvious lie that even typing it made me wince.

Can we talk? was the most dangerous option of all.

Talking was how Max got inside defenses I'd spent years building. He watched my face, noticed everything I didn't say, and waited through silences until I became desperate to fill them. If I sat down with him now, he'd know something was wrong within thirty seconds, and another thirty might be all it took before I told him everything.

Then he'd want to see the video.

That thought was enough to make me lock my phone again.

I could fix this without him ever knowing. I'd been doing exactly that since I was drafted, and one more day shouldn't have felt impossible.

Nobody called it practice because it wasn't.

After three playoff games and two flights in less than a week, Kinkaid would've faced open rebellion if he'd tried to make us skate hard on what was supposed to be a recovery day. The guys who needed treatment came in early, everyone had recovery work, and we had video and meetings before being released to spend the rest of the day pretending we weren't already thinking about Game Four.

Normally, I liked days like this. There was something reassuring about the routine, particularly during the playoffs when everything outside the arena became louder and more dramatic with every win or loss.

Today, I would've preferred bag skates because at least then I'd have been too busy trying not to vomit to notice Max giving me exactly the space I'd asked for.

That wasn't fair.

He wasn't avoiding me. He was respecting me, which turned out to be significantly more painful when you were the idiot who'd asked for distance and then immediately wanted him to ignore the request.

Max was already in the training room when I walked in, sitting on one of the tables while someone worked on his shoulder. He looked tired, although probably no more than the rest of us, and the bruise along his jaw from last night's game had darkened overnight.

His eyes found me almost immediately, and for one stupid second, something inside me lifted.

Then Max gave me the same polite nod he would've given Dante or Baelor and turned back to the trainer.

It shouldn't have hurt as much as it did.

I'd told him not now, told him I wasn't coming over and ignored the only message he'd sent afterward, so Max treating me like a teammate instead of the man he'd slept with was exactly what I'd asked for.

Apparently I was an asshole as well as a coward, because I hated every second of it.

“Morning.”