"I'm not scared," I protest automatically. "I'm being smart. I spent years of my life being Josh Grentley's wife, and you know what I got out of it? A huge betrayal, a pile of divorce papers, and the need for therapy."
"Tucker isn't Josh," she points out gently.
"No, but he's cut from the same cloth." I stab at my ice cream. "I need to focus on my future."
Mel nods, accepting this. "Fair enough. For what it's worth, though, I’m having constant flashbacks to how that man looked at you.”
I ignore the flutter in my chest at her words. "Ice cream's melting," I say instead, and she lets me change the subject.
The entire week passes in a blur of classes, study sessions, and determined efforts to forget Tucker Stag. I throw myself into schoolwork with renewed vigor, as if acing statistics could somehow erase the memory of his hands on my skin, his voice in my ear.
It almost works. By Saturday, I can go several hours without thinking of him. Progress.
I spread my notes across the kitchen table, highlighters lined up like soldiers ready for battle. The statistics exam on Monday looms large, and despite Mel's patient tutoring, I'm still struggling with confidence intervals and hypothesis testing.
"You can do this," I mutter to myself, flipping through mytextbook. "You used to be good at school. You can be good at it again."
My phone buzzes with a notification, a welcome distraction from the sea of numbers. I unlock it to find a news alert.
**FURY GOALTENDER GRENTLEY GRINS AND BARES ALL AT TEAMMATE'S WEDDING**
My first instinct is to ignore it. Josh's life isn't my concern anymore. But curiosity—that terrible, persistent human flaw—gets the better of me, and I tap the link.
The article is a fluffy buzz piece. A casual backyard wedding with Gunnar Stag—Josh’s nemesis, turned goalie partner. The caption refers to an “intimate ceremony with family and teammates.”
Family indeed. There’s Tucker and his brothers. Their father—I remember him from the photos in Tucker’s apartment. God, I should not know any of this.
I scroll through the images, telling myself I'm just procrastinating on statistics. There's Josh, and the sight of him is less painful than I expected. He's dressed casually in khakis and a blue button-down, actually smiling in a way I rarely saw during our marriage. He looks lighter somehow, more at ease than I remember. But he’s still separated from the group, isolating himself even here.
I continue scrolling, past photos of the happy couple, of teammates I vaguely recognize. If things had been different, I would have been there, too.
My brain stutters, snagging on what might have been. Would I have been pregnant by now if Josh hadn’t unilaterally stolen that option from us? The room lurches, images flashing through my mind. Tucker above me on his couch, saying all the right things.
Tucker behind me at the ski house, making me feel incredible.
Tucker’s hands—rough-textured but so, so gentle.
But then, I see Josh screaming at me in our kitchen, me ripping up documents as I scream right back.
"No," I whisper, scrolling frantically through more photos. There's another—Josh shaking hands with Tucker, both tight-lipped. My ex-husband and the man I've been sleeping with,together in the same frame. I notice that Tucker seems tense, and I hate that I’m able to observe that. I can’t be thinking about Tucker at all, let alone reading his moods.
I tried to disconnect from the hockey world during our separation and divorce, precisely because of this kind of thing. Dr. Rivera had encouraged it—a clean break from the environment that had consumed me. I became so resentful, so angry that I allowed myself to be absorbed by that world so profoundly, I lost touch with every friend I’d made. And forget about ties to the Black community in that white world of hockey and hockey fans.
The second I left my marriage, I unsubscribed from Partners and Wives group chats, unfollowed social media accounts, donated or destroyed every piece of Fury merchandise I owned.
Yet I can’t seem to quit these news alerts. Even now, my finger hesitates above the checkbox to unsubscribe.
Reading more of the article, I see that Tucker and his brothers joined the team right when Josh and I separated. I had already stopped attending games by then, stopped paying attention to roster changes or team news. I'd been so focused on surviving the shocking news that my husband lied to me, on reclaiming my identity, that I'd effectively erased hockey from my consciousness.
But that doesn’t change who Tucker is. Where he works. The fact that he is off limits. It felt delicious at the party.
It feels destructive now.
I nod, determined, and block Tucker's number with shaking fingers. Then I turn back to my statistics textbook, focusing on the one thing I can control—my future.
CHAPTER 10
TUCKER
