“Maybe. But she has a son. All I know is that I need to see them again.”
Sean’s grin fades. “Are you going to tell her about the money?”
I cast a sharp glance his way and scoff. “No. Every single time I’ve told a woman about it, it ends badly for me. This much money is a curse.”
“Dibs on taking your money over when you’re done with it,” Tyler quips, holding up his hand high in the air.
“Shut it. You already get cheap rent,” I remind him.
“So, what are you going to do?” Mason side-eyes me.
“I have ideas.” But I won’t share them yet. An email from Renae pings on my phone. I head straight to my office and call her on video.
One ring and her face fills the screen, glasses low on her nose. “Hello, sir. I was about to ring you up to go over things. And I have news,” she starts.
“Good. I could use it.”
“Don’t get your hopes up yet.” She holds up a finger. The camera wobbles, and I hear the hiss of a can opening offscreen. She returns to the frame with a Mountain Dew in hand, sipping like it’s a medical device keeping her alive. “Okay. Now I’m ready.”
“You put me on hold for that?”
“Sir, Mountain Dew is my lifeline. I have yet to hit my limit today.” She takes another sip. “Open your email.”
I open my laptop and click on the attachment. It’s like a scrapbook of Stella’s life appears before me. “Renae, this is more than I expected.”
“You asked for information about Stella. So I dug,” she cuts in and shrugs. “Some old friends of mine at the Pentagon owed me a favor.”
“Jesus.” When I hired her with her Army background, I wondered if it might come in handy one day.
“Well, if you’re going to obsess about your first love, then at least you do it with facts, not fantasies, sir.”
“I never said Stella was my first love.”
She peers at me sternly over the rim of her glasses, eyebrows raised above intense brown eyes.
“Fine. She was my first,” I admit, but I don’t tell Renae that Stella was my only love. I hardly count my ex-wife in the love category at all because I think with Bunny it was only lust, and she had me fooled from day one.
I open Renae’s summary titled BRANCH, STELLA — Background.
Basic info: she lives above her mom’s Cozy Corner Craft Shop in Boulder, working part-time there while completing an education degree at the University of Colorado, Boulder campus.
I relive our breakup in my mind. The Tigers had just won the hockey cup, and agents were calling me nonstop since my draft prospects were promising. Then came the last night we were together, when Stella said we were headed in two different directions.
I had disagreed and told her we could get through anything as long as we held onto our love and what we had together. She didn’t believe me enough to change her mind. But the timing of the breakup was so strange, right on the heels of our team winning the Frozen Four Championship.
While I was living out my ultimate senior year playing for all the glory on the number one college team in the states, she was withdrawing from me and I couldn’t bring her out of it. Something weighed her down, and I refuse to believe she just fell out of love with me.
I scroll deeper into the report. The list of her bills is long: parking tickets, car registration overdue, student loans in deferment, her mother’s medical bills. The numbers aren’t massive to me, but they’re the sort of weight that can break a single mother.
“She’s carrying a lot of debt.” It’s scary what the Pentagon contacts where able to uncover.
“A fuck ton. Hers and her mother’s,” Renae states, voice matter-of-fact.
“And she’s doing all of this alone,” I whisper. My jaw tightens. “Is this the complete list of bills?”
Renae’s gaze sharpens. “Don’t whip out your checkbook yet.”
“Why not?” Bills of this magnitude can turn life into survival mode instead of living. No wonder she seemed frazzled when she left the ice rink.
