Tonight, I'm choosing something else.
The door opens, and Garrett fills the frame, his presence immediately changing the temperature of the room. He'sholding something small, and when he crosses to the table, he places it in front of me with the kind of careful deliberation that makes my pulse kick.
A napkin. With a flower drawn on it in blue ink.
I stare at it for a beat, then look up at him, raising an eyebrow to hide the nervous flutter in my chest.
"Oh, this is a date, is it?"
“Absolutely is.” A slow, genuine smile spreads across his face, transforming him. He pushes a stack of printouts aside, then stands and moves his chair from the far end of the table to sit directly beside me. The room suddenly feels smaller. Warmer.
“Alright, tell me one story from when you were a child that explains everything I need to know about you,” Garrett says.
The question is so unexpected, a real laugh escapes me.
“Okay, fine. When my brother Easton was seven, he refused to do his chores. So, I made a binder.”
Garrett leans forward, chin resting on his hand like this is the most important story he’ll ever hear.
“It had a color-coded chart. A demerit system for non-compliance. I scheduled weeklyperformance reviewswith him in the living room. Tried to convince my parents to tie his allowance to his Key Performance Indicators.”
He throws his head back and laughs, a full-bodied, joyful sound that echoes in the quiet room and settles deep in my chest.
“You put your seven-year-old brother on a corporate improvement plan?”
“He started taking out the trash,” I say, mock-defensive. But I’m laughing too. “Okay. Your turn. Same question.”
He turns to the window, watching the lights of the city flicker below. A smile lingers on his face.
“We had this goat on my family’s farm in Saskatchewan. Chester. He had this thing for eating my hockey jerseys. Loved them. So I spent an entire weekend building this elaborate fortress around the clothesline—scrap wood, chicken wire, pulleys, three-latch gate... I thought I was a genius.”
“And was it?”
“Chester ate a hole through the gate in five minutes. Then fell asleep on my best jersey. I gave up and started hanging them in the barn.”
I grin. “So we both have a history of trying to manage stubborn, uncontrollable forces.”
"Seems so," he says, his voice softer now.
His eyes meet mine. And in them, I see not the star athlete, not the man with the media-wary stare—but the kid who got outsmarted by a goat.
The story breaks the last of the tension, and the conversation flows easily from there. We move from childhood mishaps to family dynamics, trading stories about the people who shaped us.
"You know what's funny?" he says, leaning back in his chair. "Growing up as the only boy with three sisters, you learn things they don't teach you in hockey."
"Like what?" I ask, genuinely curious.
A small smile tugs at his mouth. "Like how to French braid hair at six in the morning before school because Emma had a presentation and Mom was already at work. Or that when your little sister comes home crying because some kid called her stupid, you don't teach her to fight back—you teach her she's brilliant and then you spend the whole weekendhelping her build the best science fair project the fourth grade has ever seen."
Something warm unfurls in my chest. "That's... really sweet."
"Sweet nothing. They were ruthless." His laugh is genuine, affectionate. "Made me sit through hours of princess movies, used me as a practice dummy for makeup, forced me to be the groom in about a thousand pretend weddings. But they also had my back in ways that mattered. When I got cut from my first junior team, they made this elaborate 'Garrett is the best' banner and hung it in my room. Didn't ask if I wanted to talk about it—just made sure I knew they believed in me."
He pauses, something vulnerable flickering across his face.
"Hockey taught me strategy, but my sisters taught me loyalty. The real kind—not just when someone's winning, but when they're falling apart and need you to hold them together."
The honesty in his voice catches me off guard. I think about Easton, about the way we've protected each other, but how different our dynamic was.
