Page 7

I didn’t ask how he’d found it. I never asked anymore. There was always an answer—a doorman who took fifty bucks, a moving company’s paperwork, a bartender who mentioned my name to the wrong person—and none of the answers ever changed anything.

He found me.

He’d always found me, ever since the day I signed my first contract and made the terrible mistake of thinking money would let me disappear.

“You can’t be here,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, years of practice smoothing over the tremor before it could show.

“I can be wherever I want, Ashton. Free country.” He smiled, and it was the same smile from every photograph of my childhood I’d since burned. “Cute stunt at the arena, by the way. Security. Very dramatic.”

“You shouted my name in a hockey tunnel in front of forty cameras.”

“I shouted my son’s name because I’m proud of him.” He said it like it was reasonable, like it wasn’t a threat dressed up as sentiment, and that was the thing about my father that had taken me the longest to understand—he never raised his voice anymore, hadn’t in years, and somehow that was worse than when he did. “Anyway. We should talk about this month.”

There it was.

There was always a this month.

“I sent the transfer three days ago.”

“Rent’s gone up.” He said it like it was my fault, like I was the landlord charging him for the privilege of staying away from me. “Cost of living, you understand. Denver’s expensive.” Which was bullshit. He’d either been gambling or drinking…or both.

I stood there on the sidewalk with my jaw locked so tightly it ached, doing the math I always did—what was left after that month’s number, how many months of the season remained, how much longer I could keep doing this before there was nothing left to give him at all.

I thought about the video he still had, the one that would end everything if anyone ever saw it. I thought about what my teammates would say.

What Max would say.

“How much?” I asked, because that was the only question that had ever mattered between us.

He told me.

It was more than last month. It was always more than last month, and the rent on my tiny place had increased as well.

“I can’t keep doing this.”

He chuckled. “Fine. Then, as I said, I’ll settle for the payout I get selling the video to the press and watch your career go up in smoke.”

I paused for a millisecond, hating him, hating this, but then I hated caving more. It was pathetic.

“I’ll send it tomorrow,” I muttered in defeat.

“You’re a good boy, Ashton.” He said it the way you’d praise a dog for not biting, and something in me curled up and died a little further, the way it always did. “Nice win tonight, by the way. Really. I mean that.”

I didn’t answer. I just watched him walk off down the sidewalk like he hadn’t taken another piece out of me, whistling something I didn’t recognize, hands back in his pockets, not a single backward glance.

He didn’t need one.

He knew I’d pay. He knew I’d move again, start looking first thing tomorrow at listings in some other part of the city where the doormen didn’t know my name yet, and he knew none of it would matter because he’d find me there too.

I let myself into the building and took the stairs instead of the elevator, needing the burn in my legs, needing something simple and physical to focus on that wasn’t the sick, familiar terror still sitting cold in my gut.

By the time I got my key in my own door, my hands were shaking hard enough that it took three tries. I stood in the dark of my apartment for a long moment before I bothered with the lights, just breathing, trying to remember that I was allowed to fall apart now that no one was watching.

I thought about Max’s hand at the small of my back in the tunnel. I thought about the way I’d almost told him everything at the bar, the way something in me had actually started to loosen, actually started to believe for about ninety seconds that maybe I could hand someone a piece of this and not have it used against me.

Then I thought about Melanie’s hand on his arm and the disgust that had risen up so fast and clean it startled even me. Standing there in the dark with my father’s threat still hanging in the air like smoke, I understood exactly why I couldn’t afford to believe that again.

I didn’t turn the lights on. I just sat down on the floor with my back against the door and let myself shake for a while, because there was no one here to see it, and that was the only kind of safe I knew how to be.