“Sammie?” Dad’s voice, muffled. Closer than I’d like.
“Equipment inventory,” I call, aiming for bored.
“Come up when you’re done.”
His steps recede, not far enough. The equipment room exhales. I look at Triston and he looks at my mouth for exactly the length of a breath. “Don’t,” I whisper.
“I won’t,” he says, and the clean obedience teases heat up my throat. “One more line.”
“Make it small,” I warn.
He does not. “Mine,” he says, quiet as a sin. Not the way men say it when they mean ownership; the way people say it when they meanhome. The word drops into me like a stone into a well and the sound it makes is not a splash; it’s a resonance.
“Go,” I tell him, because I’m the one holding the leash on this thing and if I let go we will drag the whole building into our gravity.
He goes. Not because he wants to; because he trusts me. The door clicks. I sit on a plastic bin and breathe until my eyes sting. Then I label surge protectors like the fate of the season depends on the neatness of my handwriting.
The rest of the afternoon behaves. It’s almost insulting how normal it becomes once you set the wolves down and ask them to heel. I run through the program with PR: welcome, speech, video package, donations appeal, thank-yous. I nod at a volunteer who thinks sequins are a personality trait. I answer a phone call from a donor who wants to know if the vegetarian option is “actual food.” I tell him it is and hang up and laugh into my elbow because if I don’t I will cry at someone who can afford better manners.
Near five, Dad knocks on my doorframe and stays there like the threshold is Switzerland. “Walk with me,” he says.
We do a loop of the rink concourse together, past the trophy wall, past the photo of Andrew with his grin tilted and his eyes on a future that didn’t happen. I touch the frame with the back of my fingers as we pass. Dad sees. Dad always sees.
“Do you remember when you were eight and you told your teacher you wanted to be in charge of the bake sale because the last one was ‘chaos in the shape of cupcakes’?” he asks.
“I was insufferable,” I say.
“You were right,” he says. “You usually are.”
We walk another ten yards in quiet that isn’t awkward. “You’re different,” he says finally, not gentle, not unkind. “Not the kind ofdifferent that makes me check doors. The kind that looks like you’re standing where you meant to stand.”
I stop. He stops. We face the glass together, the ice on the other side clean as a lie. “I am,” I say. “Different.”
“Good,” he says, and the relief in it makes me want to cry for all the ways we could have been enemies and are choosing not to. He clears his throat. “I’m not going to ask you to end something I don’t have the power to bless.”
“I wouldn’t,” I say. “End it because you asked, I mean.”
“I know,” he says. “And that’s how I know it’s not a toy.”
We start walking again. He locks and unlocks his jaw twice, the way he does when he’s lining a shot up in his head. “If he hurts you, I won’t be reasonable.”
“He knows,” I say.
“You told him?”
“He told me,” I say, and Dad lets out a breath that could be a laugh in a kinder world.
“Of course he did,” he mutters. “Cocky bastard.”
“Accurate bastard,” I say, and we both surrender a grin.
We part at the stairs—him to the ice, me to my lists. Back in the office, the ribbon under my sleeve feels warm, like it learned a trick. I text him:
Me:Later happened.
Me:Thank you for being good.
Me:Be worse at the gala. Quietly.
