“What's good?”
“Everything. But the cinnamon rolls just came out.”
“I'll take one. And a coffee.”
She boxed up the roll and poured coffee into a paper cup, and the whole transaction felt absurdly normal. No one asking for autographs. No one recognizing me from that article three years ago. Just a woman selling baked goods to a customer.
I paid with cash and took my breakfast to a bench outside.
The cinnamon roll was still warm, probably a thousand calories of sugar and butter that my nutritionist would've murdered me for. I ate it anyway, sitting on a cold bench in running clothes, watching the city wake up around me.
It was perfect.
Dad bod solidarity, I thought, and almost laughed at myself.
I'd spent my twenties and thirties obsessed with being lean and fast and game-ready. Now I was forty-one with a soft middle and knees that ached when it rained, and honestly I didn't hate it. This body had carried me through a decade of professional hockey and another decade of coaching. It had earned the right to eat a fucking cinnamon roll on a Friday morning.
I finished eating and started running again, slower this time, taking actual notice of where I was. The neighborhood had a rhythm—quieter than downtown, more residential, the kind of place where people actually knew their neighbors. I liked it.
I was trying to figure out which street would take me back when something hit me at approximately knee height and nearly took me off my feet.
I stumbled, caught myself, and looked down.
A golden retriever was attempting to climb my entire body, all wagging tail and scrambling paws and an expression of absolute deranged joy, like I was the specific human it had been searching for its entire life and had finally, miraculously, located on this particular sidewalk on this particular Tuesday morning.
“Hey—” I grabbed the trailing leash before it could get further tangled around my legs. “Hey. Down. Sit.”
The dog sat immediately.
“Sorry, sorry—” A voice from behind me, breathing hard, the specific cadence of someone who’d been running faster than they’d planned to. “She just—she saw you, and I lost the leash, and she’s been doing this all morning. She has absolutely zero?—”
The voice stopped.
Hartley stood on the sidewalk six feet away, hands on his knees as he caught his breath. He was wearing sweatpants that were doing nothing to help my morning, and a hoodie that had been washed enough times to go soft and shapeless in a way that somehow made things worse instead of better. His hairwas doing something it never did at the rink—loose, slightly disheveled, the kind of effortless that looked unfair.
“Coach,” he said.
“Hartley,” I said.
We looked at each other.
The dog looked between us with the attentive interest of someone following a tennis match.
“This is yours?” I said, nodding at the dog.
“My sister's.” He straightened up, taking the leash back from me with a hand that brushed mine for approximately half a second in the exchange, which I noted and immediately filed underirrelevant, moving on.“Her doggy daycare's under renovation. She had a double shift this morning and apparently I'm the only person in Leah's life who doesn't have a real job.”
“You have a real job.”
“I play hockey. According to Leah, that's a hobby that pays well.” He looked down at the dog, who was now sitting on my foot. “Her name's Biscuit.”
“Of course it is.” I looked down at Biscuit, who looked back up at me with complete adoration. “She always like this?”
“She did the same thing to a fire hydrant twenty minutes ago. I don't think it's personal.” He paused. “Actually, she sat for you. She doesn't usually sit for anyone. She doesn't even sit for Leah.”
“I told her to sit.”
“And she just—” He gestured at the dog. “Biscuit. Sit.”
