And as if I needed any other doubts, I suddenly heard Harper’s voice from our study session yesterday.
I bet having a baby is really affecting your hockey performance.
The comment had fucking stung because I couldn’t deny how true it was. And my time on the ice today had only cemented that fact home. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t leave my shit at the door. I couldn’t just skate out on the ice with a single-minded focus of crushing our opponents.
And the biggest problem was that I had no clue how to fix it.
“I can do this, Coach. I’ll get my head in the game.”
Unfortunately, that ended up not being the case, and second period was worse than the first.
First shift, I lost my gap on their top winger, giving him a clean lane into our zone. I recovered just in time to get my stick in the way, but it deflected the puck right onto anotherRam’s blade. Gordy bailed me out with a blocker save that rattled off the glass.
A few minutes later, I mishandled a simple D-to-D pass on the breakout. The puck hopped over my stick, and by the time I turned to chase it down, their forechecker was already on me. I tried to chip it up the boards, but instead coughed it right to their point man, who ripped a shot that caught the post.
By the midway mark, I was so far in my own head that even my positioning went to hell. On the penalty kill, I chased the puck behind the net and left their guy parked in the slot wide open. They didn’t miss that one. Red light. 2–1, Rams.
Coach didn’t even wait for the shift to end. He was on his feet at the bench, jaw tight, motioning me over. “That’s it, Monty. You’re done for now,” he barked as I stepped off the ice. “Grab some water and figure your shit out.”
I watched the rest of the game from the bench, and guilt burned like acid in my gut as my team played better without me on the ice. I was supposed to be an asset, not a liability.
It was a close game, but Foster scored the winning goal with a perfect shot between the goalie’s pads right before the time ran out in the third period.
The arena went nuts as the crowd cheered and I watched the guys on my team piling on each other with smiles. We were going to the championship.
But all I felt was hollow.
Who the hell was I if I wasn’t able to play hockey without getting distracted by worrying about my daughter?
TWENTY-TWO
The guitar felt like an old friend in my hands, familiar and comforting in a way that my violin couldn’t be tonight. Sometimes when I got stuck on a piece—really stuck, like I had been on the Bach for the past few days—switching instruments helped unlock whatever was jamming up my brain.
The house was blissfully quiet for once. Rachel was at the library, Ayanna had gone home for the weekend to see her parents, and Talia was out with some guy she’d met in her voice pedagogy class. The only noise was the sound of the students walking by heading to the Den—the notorious football house on the other side of the hockey house.
I sat cross-legged on my bed, strumming my guitar to no particular tune because my mind kept wandering to places I didn’t want it to go. Or maybe I should say places Ishouldn’twant it to go.
Places like the coffee shop, sitting across from Drew.
I absolutely should not, under any circumstances, be thinking about how he looked awestruck whenever he talked about Rory.
Or how vulnerable he looked when he apologized to me.
I couldn’t remember a single moment when he’d sincerely been sorry for his actions toward me, not even during those brief few weeks in sixth grade.
They said parenthood changed you, and apparently they weren’t kidding because Drew had become someone I might actually consider being friends with.
And because that idea had me feeling all sorts of confused, I had turned to music to find my equilibrium again.
Music had always been the core of who I was. It wasn’t just my major or my career path, but something deeper than that. It was the language I spoke when words weren’t enough, the way I made sense of the world when everything else felt chaotic. Although, it was taking longer than usual to find that happy place among all the images of Drew over the years that flashed through my mind.
More students kept walking by heading toward the party, and I could faintly make out the bass.
But there was another distinct sound that I heard even clearer.
A baby’s cry.
Gently setting down my guitar, I got up and moved to the window, parting the curtains I mostly kept shut because this window faced directly into Drew’s bedroom. I’d spent the entire school year actively avoiding looking out this window, especially at night, because I didn’t want to see Drew bringing home whatever girl had caught his attention that week. I didn’t need to witness his revolving door of hookups when I was already fighting the stupid, irrational part of me that had always been attracted to him.
