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I get home. I hang my coat square on the hook. I line up my shoes. And I stand in the front hall of the Sailmaker with my hand pressed over the bite on my shoulder, the mark of a boy who forgot to be careful with me, and I let myself feel exactly one whole minute of the thing I’m not allowed to feel.

Then I fix my face. And I do not, under any circumstances, think about the morning.

The Sailmaker is warm and loud with the good kind of noise. Wren’s on the couch with her feet tucked under her and something murmuring on the TV — one of her true-crime things, a narrator being grave about a man in Ohio — and June’s at the stove with her sleeves pushed up and a wooden spoon, and the whole house smells like garlic and onions and something tomato-based that’s been going a while. Kevin the fern sits on the windowsill, thriving out of pure spite. Home. Actual home, the kind with no arrangements in it.

“Hey, stranger,” Wren says., “You eating? June made enough for a small army and half a second army.”

“It’s just pasta,” June says to the pot. “It’s not a big thing.”

“It’s a huge thing, you put anchovies in it, don’t undersell yourself.” Wren finally glances over at me, and I brace for it — for the read, for those ice-blue eyes to land on the thing I’m carrying in like contraband — but she just takes in my general state and misreads it beautifully. “You look wrecked. Long study group?”

And there it is, the gift I don’t deserve: they think I’ve been at a study group. Because I said I had one, three days ago, in passing, and Wren keeps a calendar of everyone’s whereabouts in her head the way I keep one on a corkboard, and it never occurred to a single person in this house to wonder if the study group was a boy.

“So long,” I say, and it comes out almost normal. “Adler’s project is eating me alive.”

“The ethics thing with Mercer, right?” Wren doesn’t even have to search for it, because of course she doesn’t — she’s on the women’s team, she’s watched Theo anchor a blue line for almost three years, she knows precisely which enormous scowling defenseman I’ve been chained to for a grade. She makes a face that’s almost sympathy. “God. How’s that going? He’s about as chatty as a locked door.”

“You have no idea,” I say, which is the truest thing I’ve said all day, and I say it lightly, and it costs me something to say it lightly. His name in my own kitchen does a small, treasonous thing to my chest, and I keep my face doing absolutely nothing at all. “It’s a lot of hours.”

“Rather you than me. Man once answered a whole postgame interview in, like, six words total. It’s a gift.” She goes back to her documentary, unbothered, unsuspicious, completely done with the subject.

“I’m going to grab a quick shower before we eat,” I say. “I smell like a library.”

Which is a lie — I smell like him, like his sheets and his soap and the specific afternoon we just had, and I need it off me before I can sit at a table with two people I love and pretend I’m a whole and uncomplicated person — but I smell like a library is the kind of sentence nobody in the history of the world has ever questioned, so up the stairs I go.

And the shower does what the shower always does, which is undo me a little where nobody can see. I stand under the hot water and I finally let my shoulders come down, and I catch myself, without deciding to, pressing my fingertips to the mark on my shoulder — the bite, gone plum-dark now, tender when I touch it — and I don’t scrub at it. That’s the thing I notice, standing there. Any other version of me would already be trying to erase it. This one leaves it.

I wash him off my skin and I can’t quite wash off the rest of it: three monitors, a blinking cursor, a girl who fixes things with her hands, written down by a boy who can’t lie. I let myself have it for exactly the length of the hot water and not one second longer, because that’s the deal I make with myself, and it’s a con, and knowing it’s a con has never once stopped me.

By the time I come down in leggings and my softest sweater with my hair wet down my back, I’m handled. Or handled-adjacent. Handled enough.

June’s set three places at the little table by the window, and Wren’s abandoned Ohio to fill water glasses, and there’s a bowl of pasta in the middle of the table that is, in fact, a huge thing, anchovies and all. And I sit down between the two of them, and June asks Wren to explain why she watches shows that are just men describing terrible afternoons, and Wren says it relaxes her and June says that is deeply concerning and Wren says you’re deeply concerning, and I laugh — a real one, surprised out of me — and for a little while the whole afternoon lets go of me.

They don’t know. That’s the mercy of it. They don’t know I nearly got caught two floors up in Theo’s bed, or that I found the inside of him on a computer screen and it broke something loose in my chest I can’t get closed again. They just think I had a long study group and I smell like a library, and they pass me the parmesan, and they fold me into an ordinary Thursday like it’s nothing, like I’m nothing more complicated than a tired roommate who came home for dinner.

And I let them. God, I let them. I sit in my warm kitchen with my anchovy pasta and my oblivious girls, and I am so grateful to be, for one hour, a person nobody’s reading.

Chapter 8

Theo

The bus smells like cold and liniment and forty guys who’ve been awake since five, and I’ve got my hood up and my headphones on and nothing playing through them.

That’s my pregame. Silence that looks like music, so nobody talks to me. Two and a half hours north, up out of Massachusetts and into Vermont, the highway going from gray slush to real snow the higher we climb, the trees closing in, the towns getting smaller and further apart until there’s nothing but white and dark and the occasional gas station lit up like the last outpost before the end of the world. Coach put the itinerary on the group chat this morning like it was information instead of a threat. Burlington. UVM. Puck drop 7:00 PM. Overnight at the Hilton, curfew 11:00, room checks. Everybody read it the same way. Conference road game against a team that’s beaten us the last two years running. We hate them. That’s the short version. They’re second in the conference, we’re third, and tonight decides who’s chasing who into March. It’s a game that matters, and games that matter are the only place my head goes quiet, so I should be grateful, and I am, in the specific joyless way you’re grateful for the one thing that works.

I watch the towns go by and do the thing I do on every road trip, which is the tally, whether I want to or not. This bus is paid for by the athletic department. The hotel tonight is on the program. But the gear bag at my feet, the skates I got resharpened, the protein I choke down, the phone I’m not listening to music on — my father pays for all of it, one clean transfer a month, no note, and every mile of this drive is a mile I’m traveling on Lucas Mercer’s dime. He’s never seen me play. Not once. Not a single game, junior hockey or college, home or away. But he pays for the bus that takes me to them, which is the whole man in one sentence: present in the account, absent in the stands, and somehow that’s worse than if he’d just disappeared clean.

The draft’s the day I zero it out. Bruins, if the universe has any decency left in it — my team, my city, the one that gets my mom off her feet and me off his string in the same signature. Then I pay him back to the dollar and I never owe that man anything again.

I know all this. I run it every road trip like a rosary I hate. And then I put it away, because tonight there’s a game, and because somewhere in the four cars that drove up separately behind this bus, there’s a girl I want in the stands more than I’ve admitted to anyone, including me.

The gang came up for it. All of them.

That’s not weird — Beau’s on the trip regardless, sling and all, because a captain who can’t play is still a captain, and where Beau goes lately Sloane goes, and where Sloane goes the whole warm chaotic orbit of them follows. Cash and Wyatt are dressing. So it’s Beau and Sloane and June and Margo who piled into two cars and drove two and a half hours through the snow to sit in a freezing barn in Vermont and watch a hockey game, and nobody thinks anything of it, because that’s what this group does. They show up for each other. It’s the thing I still don’t quite believe about them even months of it.

Except one of them didn’t drive two-and-a-half hours for the team.

I caught it the second Margo said she was coming, three days ago, in a text that pretended to be about the project.