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I fall asleep before I finish the thought. She’s still there in the morning, gone before Cash is up, same as always.

Thursday morning, I tell Cash and Wyatt I’m heading to Boston to see my mom.

“Alone?” Cash asks, through a mouthful of cereal, not really paying attention.

“Yeah.”

“Tell Laney I said hey.” Cash has met my mother a handful of times over the years — she came up for a game once, and there was that one Thanksgiving none of us had anywhere else to be and she drove up with a car full of food. He says it the way he says most things about her, automatic, warm, not thinking too hard about it. “You good on gas money? I can Venmo you if —”

“I’m good, Cash.”

“Just checking.” He goes back to his cereal, then looks up again a second later, chewing, curious in the specific unfiltered way that’s just Cash being Cash. “How’s she doing? Your mom.”

“Good. Busy. Picking up extra shifts.”

“She still at the same hospital?”

“Yeah.” I’m mildly surprised he remembers that detail at all, given how little I’ve actually told him about her over three years of living in the same house. “Same one.”

“Tell her I said she raised a good one.” He says it lightly, but there’s something real underneath it, the specific Cash quality of being more perceptive than his general chaos would suggest. “Seriously. You’re one of the good ones, Mercer. Somebody did something right.”

I don’t know what to do with that. I just nod and grab my keys. Cash goes back to his cereal like he hasn’t just said something that’s going to sit with me for the entire drive.

Wyatt, at the other end of the table, gives me the quiet nod that means he’s registered the information and has nothing further to add. The most efficient possible response, and one I appreciate more than I’d ever say out loud.

I don’t correct the alone. It’s not exactly a lie. I am the one driving. I am the one who arranged the visit. And if anyone traced my truck to a rest stop pickup four minutes from the Sailmaker, I’d have to actually explain something I’m not ready to explain to this room yet. So I let alone stand, and I feel the specific weight of that omission sitting somewhere behind my ribs, tucked in beside all the other things I’m not saying to the people who matter to me right now.

I clear it with Coach separately. One day, off the ice, family thing, back by tonight. He doesn’t ask questions. Just tells me to be smart about the drive and back by curfew, and that’s the whole conversation. Frozen Four prep doesn’t stop for anyone, but one day off the ice this early in the week isn’t going to break anything, and Coach knows the difference between a player who needs a day and a player who’s making excuses.

I pack light. A change of shirt, in case something spills, which is a habit from years of never quite trusting a day to go according to plan. I check the truck’s oil, which it doesn’t need, because I’m nervous in a way I don’t have a better outlet for and checking fluid levels feels like doing something useful with my hands. I look at myself in the mirror longer than I usually bother to. Not vanity. Just the specific low-grade anxiety of wanting to arrive looking like someone worth introducing, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what that would look like differently from how I always look.

I’ve never once been nervous walking into a hockey rink, not for a scout, not for a scholarship offer, not for anything with actual stakes attached to it in the way people usually mean stakes. I’m nervous about a two-bedroom house in Dorchester in a way that makes no logical sense and makes complete sense anyway.

I pick her up four minutes from the Sailmaker, same spot as always, engine running, sun barely up over the tree line.

She gets in with a coffee in each hand. One for her, one already fixed exactly the way I take mine — she’s paid enough attention over the months to know that without asking. She hands it to me before she’s even got her seatbelt on.

“Morning,” she says.

“Morning.”

“You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

“I haven’t slept in a week.”

She reaches over and squeezes my knee once, brief, grounding. The specific gesture she does when she’s not going to make it into a whole conversation but wants me to know she sees it anyway.

“Well,” she says. “You’ve got an hour of highway and good coffee. Use it.”

I pull out of the spot and point the truck toward the highway. Toward Boston. Toward a house in Dorchester, on Birch Street, where a woman who raised me alone on a nurse’s salary is waiting to meet the person I apparently can’t stop thinking about, even when I’m running on sixty percent capacity and half a night’s sleep.

Neither of us says much for the first few miles. The radio’s low. The coffee’s good. The whole impossible week sits behind us for exactly one hour, and ahead of us is something I’ve never done before. Something that scares me in a way hockey never has. Something that matters more than almost anything else on my very full plate right now.

“You’re quiet,” she says, somewhere around the second highway sign, glancing over at me.

“Thinking.”

“About?”