“Ah, good! You’re here,” he said. “There’s the hot water and some mugs. I need to run into the presser in a couple of minutes.” He offered me a broad smile. “I know Paxton’s going to be glad to see you.”
Silas Whittaker was big, like the players, and I assumed he’d played before he began coaching. He towered over Ida Jane and me, just as Paxton did. There was something…warming about his size.
“He had a good game tonight,” Coach Whittaker added. “Clearly you being here brought out the fire that’s been missing all season.”
“Thanks,” I said, dazed. Had I entered an alternate reality? I felt off-kilter, as if these people knew much more of my story than I did theirs.
I guessed that was because, as Ida Jane had said, Paxton had talked about me. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He’d never reached out, hadn’t shown any interest in years. Now, suddenly, he wanted me in his life again. I’d had whiplash from the accident, and this sensation was similar—just as disconcerting.
Ida Jane got to work preparing cocoa as Coach Whittaker peered at me kindly. I felt like a deer caught in headlights. I wanted to say something. Licking my lips, I opened my mouth.
“They’re ready for you, Coach,” a young woman in a Wildcatters polo announced.
He nodded, then began patting his pockets. He reminded me of my dad, looking for his glasses. A pang of loss hit hard and fast. My father had been my world, but he’d died when I was young—right before we moved from Brooklyn to the small community in Connecticut where I’d met Paxton.
I wondered if we would have moved had my father survived his aneurism. I also wondered if staying in Brooklyn would have saved me a world of pain.
But we hadn’t; my mother had been determined to move even before my father’s death, and we’d been ensconced in a new house two short months after his funeral.
I still missed my dad. My mother…not so much.
“Your glasses are atop your head,” I offered.
“Ah! Thanks. Yes, well, I better go deal with the press. Let’s chat again soon, Hana.”
He smiled again before he strolled out. I turned my attention to Ida Jane. “You realize it’s like I walked into Wonderland, right?”
“Because we know more about you than you do us? Or because we’re all rooting for Naese and you to find a happy ending?” She sipped from a mug, smacked her lips, and practically purred. “It’s delicious!”
She picked up the other mug and handed it to me. “I…I guess.” I stared down into the dark liquid as I gathered my courage and met Ida Jane’s clear blue eyes. “Paxton and I haven’t seen each other in years. He broke my heart.” I shook my head. “He never came to see me in the hospital.” My voice broke, but I blinked back the threatening tears.
Ida Jane raised an eyebrow. “I can tell you with absolute certainty that he didn’t know,” she said softly. She took another sip of her drink and met my gaze over the top. “I can also tell you there’s something strange about how Naese’s parents kept your hospitalization from him.”
I stared back down into the cocoa, frozen for a moment. Yes, I believed so, too.
“Naese told Cruz, who told Cormac, Maxim, and Stolly, that he’d cut his parents out of his life. For good.”
I sipped the sweet, rich brew. “I know how important Naese’s family is to him?—”
“And he’d put youbeforethem now that he knows what they did, what they hid,” Ida Jane said. She shook her head and raised her free hand. “I’m sorry. I’m totally overstepping my place. I just want to see Naese happy. He deserves it.” She smiled. “And now that I’ve met you, I want you two to be together and as crazy-happy as Maxim and I are.” Her smile softened. “I canfeelhow right you are for each other, and I know he loves you so very much.”
"He loves you so very much.” The words echoed in my head. Hadn’t I told myself that when we went to different universities? When I saw him less and less thanks to his hockey schedule? Even when he told me we should break up because his schedule would be too hard on me…
But I’d been wrong about Paxton then, and Ida Jane as wrong now. Abandonment wasn’t love. Not after the accident, butbefore. Paxton had thrown me away without regard for my feelings and without the respect our relationship deserved, and I couldn’t pretend otherwise.
I set the half-filled mug down on the edge of the desk. The constant anger I’d barely learned to leash now swirled upward, choking me. I didn’t know Ida Jane, and I couldn’t be sure I knew Paxton, could I? He was not the person I’dthoughthe’d been before he left me, and I had only just met the person he was today. “You know what? I can’t do this.”
Ida Jane kept her expression neutral, almost as if she’d expected my response. “What exactly can’t you do?”
“Pretend that I’m fine with the way he broke up with me. With the hookups afterward, with his sudden reappearance. The reporters. This world. All of it.”
She nodded, her eyes never leaving mine. “Well, at least you know.”
I bit my lip to keep from snapping a response. Ida Jane had been kind to me. I wouldn’t repay her with surliness; I wouldn’t react like my mother. “Thank you,” I said. I headed toward the door, my leg aching with each step, reminding me why I shouldn’t even consider the fairy tale I’d never get with Paxton.
I was better off in the quiet of the lab. Unassuming and unknown. I didn’t want this life.
“For the record, he was happier tonight, more focused, than I’ve ever seen him,” Ida Jane called.
