I exhaled, then drew back to meet his gaze. “I’m good.It’s hard, you know?” I nodded toward the headstone. “I think it always will be. But I’m not a mess like I was before.”
Peyton gently cradled my face in both hands. “You were never a mess. You were going through hell.” He pressed the softest kiss to my forehead, then another to my lips. “If I’d lost someone like him, I wouldn’t have been in any better shape.”
The lump in my throat grew, and I leaned into him again, resting my head against his shoulder and closing my eyes as he wrapped his arms around me. If I’d learned anything going through the last year, it was how fortunate I was to have so many good people in my life. That whole time I’d been trying desperately to be stronger than I was, I’d been oblivious to just how many people cared about me. They didn’t want me to be strong—they wanted me to be okay.
And more and more as time went on, I believed I would be. I believed Iwas.
Though I’d long since finished the player assistance program, I still saw Shannon twice a month, and she’d been a godsend. When she’d told me I’d have moments where the grief would stop me in my tracks, she’d also gone on to explain that contrary to popular belief, grief didn’t just go away. There didn’t come a point where it was wrapped up in a neat little bow and stored on a shelf. Closure was more like turning a page than closing a book—it was forward motion, it was distance, but wasn’t the end. For many people, that grief never completely went away.
At first, I’d been devastated by the idea of feeling like this forever, but she’d gone on to tell me that understanding that if I still grieved, I wasn’t broken or overreacting. The more she’d explained it, the more I’d realized what she was getting at: that once I let go of the idea that it would be goneforever, the more I could make peace with it being a diminishing constant. The more I could be gentle with myself and let myself experience those periods of grief when they came, rather than worry I was backsliding or wallowing.
“Twenty years from now,”Shannon had told me one day,“you might have gone for quite a while without thinking about it. Or you’ve thought about him, but it’s happy memories now, and you’re at peace. But then one day, you see or hear something that reminds you of Leif, and it makes you sad. That doesn’t mean you need to rush into a therapist’s office or worry that you’re not healing as much as you should. It just means you still remember how much you loved him and how much you wish he was still there. You can sit with that feeling for a little while, let yourself be sad and feel that grief, and then the next day you’ll be thinking about happy memories again. It’s okay.”
These days, I understood what she’d meant. In the year since Leif had died, I’d been able to remember the happy times more and more. I could talk about Leif without choking up, though sometimes that still happened. I’d made peace with the fact that there were bad days as well as good days, and slowly, the good days had begun to outnumber the bad.
And credit where it was due—the man holding me right now had been a godsend. There’d been a few times where I’d been having an awful day—when everything had caught up with me and I’d been overwhelmed with grief—and Peyton would sit me down and ask me to talk about the good times. He never seemed patronizing, either. He genuinely seemed to want to know all about the friend I’d lost just before we’d met, and he listened intently while I reminisced. I’d usually struggle through the first couple of stories, but as I went on, I’d feel better, and by the time I’d finished,I was still raw, but less brittle. Less focused on the void Leif had left behind and instead reminded of all the reasons he’d been so hard to lose.
Though my relationship with Peyton had been heavily intertwined with the aftermath of losing Leif, that grief and heartache didn’t define us. As the season had gone on—and especially during the off season—we’d been able to focus on each other. We’d roomed together on road trips, and nothing in the world left me more refreshed and ready to play than waking up from a pregame nap in Peyton’s arms.
It helped, too, that I wasn’t the only one getting therapy. Peyton hadn’t been able to lock anyone down until the season was over, especially since he had no time during the playoffs. Barely three days after we were eliminated, though, he was in his new therapist’s office. They were slowly working through the trauma he hadn’t even realized he had from his mom’s alcoholism and the effect it had on the family, and it had been tough for him. There were some days he came back from therapy and just wanted to curl up on the couch and watch stupid movies. Other times, he wanted to go shoot pucks for a while until he could finally let a few tears fall and talk to me about his session.
About a month into the off season, his therapist had dug into the feelings Peyton had about Jeff Richards, his former teammate who’d lost his marriage and career to his addiction. Turned out Peyton had been harboring a lot more guilt about it than even he’d realized, and it was eating him up that he hadn’t helped him. He’d wondered all this time if Richards was even alive, and his conscience had been a wreck because he blamed himself for not stepping up.
After that session, Peyton had reached out to some other players from Detroit. They, too, were carrying a lot of shame and guilt. With some help from the League, Richards’sfamily, and—from what I’d gathered—law enforcement, they’d managed to locate their former teammate. Richards was still in a bad spot, still struggling hard with his addiction and he’d been living in his car for the past two years. He was alive, though, and—to Peyton’s immense relief—receptive to help.
In between giving him that help, Richards’s former teammates were now working to start an organization. Their plan was to not only help athletes struggling with addiction, but to offer help and resources to the friends, family, and teammates of those addicts. I’d joined them, and the Pittsburgh and Detroit clubs were both eager to pitch in. Hopefully in the coming season, the organization would launch, and people like Peyton, Richards, and me would no longer feel quite so alone.
The week before we’d left for Sweden, Richards was settling into an inpatient rehab facility in New Mexico. Peyton spoke to him on the phone, and he’d cried after they’d ended the call. I’d cautiously asked if everything was okay, and he’d smiled as he’d wiped his eyes and told me,“He wants us to visit when we get back.”
We would, too. They kept in constant communication via text and the occasional FaceTime, and they were both looking forward to our visit. So was I.
For that alone, I decided Peyton’s therapist was worth his weight in gold.
Our couples counselor was a godsend, too. Right now, he was mostly helping us navigate each other’s therapy—how to talk about things, what to ask, how to be what the other needed. Between him and our individual therapists, we were on much more solid ground than I’d thought possible.
We’d initially agreed to take our relationship slowerthan we had at the start, but at least one step ended up being unexpectedly accelerated. It was a combination of a downstairs neighbor driving Peyton insane with too-loud bass-heavy music at all hours of the day and night, and us spending almost every night together anyway. Then at the trade deadline, the team had acquired a player from the western conference, and Peyton suddenly had an opportunity to jump ship from his lease so the other player could take his apartment. The team didn’t have to fuss with finding a place to put up the new guy, the new guy wore earplugs to sleep and headphones the rest of the time—it worked out for everyone.
So… now we were living together at my place. We had the odd squabbles that came with cohabitating—I wasn’t great about keeping up on the dishes, he was the worst about leaving beard trimmings in the sink, and neither of us could ever remember when trash day was—but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It was like we’d butted heads and struck sparks off each other in the beginning, sorted all that shit out, and now everything was smooth and easy.
Sighing, I drew back again. “We should probably get out of here. Don’t want to keep the family waiting.”
Peyton didn’t move. “Are you ready to go?”
I stared down at Leif’s headstone for a long moment. I couldn’t say I felt particularlygood, standing beside my best friend’s grave and rubbing up against the raw spots of my grief, but there was a sense of peace that I was pretty sure I’d been chasing all this time. That settled feeling that even though it sure felt like it sometimes, I was not going to crumble beneath this weight.
Taking a deep breath and rolling my shoulders, I met my boyfriend’s gaze again. “I think I’m ready, yeah.” Iswallowed. “Do you, um… Do you have any objection to coming back here before we fly home?”
“Not at all,” he whispered. “We’ll spend as much time here as you need.”
I smiled, lifted my chin, and kissed him softly. “Thank you.”
He smiled back, and we shared another kiss. Longer this time, but still chaste—still appropriate for where we were.
And yet, in the back of my mind, I could hear that scoff followed by the Swedish-accented,“Jesus Christ, you two. Get a room.”
The thought drove a laugh out of me, which broke the kiss.
Peyton eyed me. “What?”
