The ribbon is nothing. It’s a scrap from the craft closet we keep for when we need to tape a fan’s sign back together. It’s a piece that fell from a wreath. It’s a Reindeer Fairy dropping fabric breadcrumbs because she couldn’t carry them all. The ribbon is nothing, and we don’t believe in ghosts.
We don’t. Except. Halloween taught me what kind of haunting I’m susceptible to, and sometimes ghosts are just living men with very steady hands and the ability to make a gift feel like a dare.
I put the ribbon in the desk drawer and close it with a care that feels like fear. Then I open it again and take the ribbon back out and loop it around my wrist. It doesn’t stay. Velvet isn’t a bow that holds if you want it to be quiet. It slides. It settles against my palm likeit was meant to be held, not worn. Fine. I’ll hold it a minute. Just a minute.
Back at the glass, practice has broken into smaller scrimmages. The rookies slash at each other with something to prove. The veterans channel their proof into competence so casual it looks like kindness. My father’s whistle has gone from surgical to weary, which means he’ll call it soon.
Twenty-three is in the corner, pinning a defenseman in a way that looks illegal and is probably just artful. He doesn’t look up, but the ribbon in my hand suddenly feels warmer, like someone breathed on it. I tuck it into my coat pocket and the gesture is ridiculous and profound. If he put it there—if—then he crossed a line and built a new one for me to step over. If he didn’t, then I’ve let the hockey rink invade my brain all the way through, and the only cure is distance I don’t want.
“Samantha?”
I jump. The team manager stands in the doorway holding a clipboard and mercy. “Donation list,” she says, shaking the papers like they’re a flag we both agreed to follow. “Want to go through it with me?”
“Yes,” I say. My voice tries to be professional and lands on human. “Let’s do it.”
We sit at the desk and build a night that deserves to exist. We accept a spa package and reject a taxidermied fish. We debate whether a weekend in a mountain cabin is romance or murder fodder and decide the donors can choose their own adventure. We argue gently about tablecloth colors because she thinks white is clean and I think white is a lie on a night where red dresses and malbec will be everywhere. We laugh. It feels foreign and wonderful, like trying on a light coat after months of armor.
In one of our pauses, when the office has forgiveness in it, the ice machine clunks to life behind the wall. I hear the last drill change, the pace of skates shifting from intent to exhaustion. Then the whistle. The one that means enough.
I don’t go to the glass this time. I don’t look. I make a pile of papers and a pile of pens and a pile of nerves, and I keep my hands away from my pocket even though the ribbon presses back like it wants out.
“Okay,” the manager says, circling totals. “We’re close.”
“We’re good,” I correct, and I let the pride be a balm. “We’re going to break every December number this team has ever posted.”
“You’re dangerous when you mean it.”
I smile without thinking. “I know.”
The boys file past the office on their way to the locker room, boots clapping over rubber mats, laughter pinging off cinderblock walls. Someone sings a wrong-lyrics version of a Christmas song. Someone else tells him to shut up with a grin. My father barks “Hydrate” and gets a chorus of groans like he demanded their firstborn.
I don’t look for him. I don’t. I stare at the manager’s pen and the way it leaves a blue trail like the ribbon waiting in my pocket, and I breathe as quietly as I can in my own office, and I think about velvet and rules and a dress I haven’t put on yet.
When the hallway goes quiet, I get up and busy my hands with the pre-printed thank-you notes. I sign my name in the place where gratitude is supposed to look easy. I write little personal nothings in the margins—We can’t do this without you—to the people who like to be seen. I tell myself writing is practice for telling the truth later, and then I tell myself I’m not going to tell any truths later, and then I admit I might have never been agood liar.
By the time I leave the office, night has pinned itself to the windows. The rink lights change character after dusk. They’re still bright, but it’s a brightness that feels like interrogation instead of performance. I tuck my chin into my scarf as I walk the hallway. The air outside the glass is colder; the Zamboni is making slow, precise passes and the driver raises a mitten at me as if we share a secret I haven’t learned yet.
My car lives in the far corner of the lot where the light pole leans like it got tired and no one wanted to correct it. I like it back there. It feels like a place to decide who I’m going to be between the building and the rest of the world. My boots crunch over old, stubborn snow. The wind gets a finger under my scarf and slides down to my collarbone. I pretend I hate it and court it anyway.
Halfway there, I stop.
It isn’t because I hear anything. The lot is as loud as a parking lot gets—distant traffic, an engine turning over, the tinny beat of someone’s music that refuses to be captured by winter. I stop because I feel the specific pull of being looked at the way you feel a magnet near a needle. It doesn’t tug hard. It hums.
I do not turn. I do not whip around like a girl in a movie who wants to be caught silhouetted in her own suspense. I don’t even lift my head enough to see a reflection in a windshield. I let the looking rest on me the way a hand can rest on a thigh under a table—claim disguised as patience.
The keys bite into my palm. I could get in the car and lock the doors and tell myself the hum was a trick. I could spin and catch him and demand answers. He's been feeding me slowly, deliberately, like a man who knows starving makes the eventual meal taste more like salvation. I do neither. I breathe in until my chest aches, and I keepwalking, and it takes everything I own not to run toward him or from him.
Inside the car, the heater coughs itself awake. The windshield fogs, then clears, then smears things into a watercolor that would be pretty if my hands didn’t shake. I rest my forehead on the steering wheel for a beat longer than confidence would allow. I count to five. On two, I smile. I don’t know why. At four, my eyes burn, but it isn’t sadness. It's a relief. It’s the relief of a promise kept: you are not done with this just because the calendar flipped.
At five, I sit up and turn my head.
There is nothing there. Of course there isn’t. The lot is a patchwork of cars and shadows. The wind moves the world in small measurable ways. I am a woman in a car on a winter night, and what I want is not on the concrete.
It’s in my pocket.
I take the ribbon out and lay it across the steering wheel, my fingers on either end, the velvet line cutting my car in half. I lift it and press it under my nose because I’m not proud and because sometimes I need rituals. It smells like fabric and cold. It smells like a decision.
At home, I put the ribbon on my dresser like a relic. I don’t bury it in a drawer. I don’t hide it under a sweater. It sits out, obvious, dangerous. A blue-black line cutting the safe parts of my room away from the parts that hold my truths. The dress I bought for the gala waits in its bag, quiet and explosive. I touch the hanger and a spark pops under my skin like static.
