Campbell finally met someone. Wish you could meet her. She’s great.
I miss you.
Season’s going better than expected. Expansion teams aren’t supposed to be good yet.
Coach says I need to work on discipline. You would’ve laughed at that.
Two years today. Still doesn’t feel real.
Hundreds of them. Two years’ worth of one-sided conversations with a disconnected number.
I know it’s pointless. I know he’s not reading them. But I also know that the second I stop, the second I let that conversation end, it means accepting something I’m not ready to accept.
I scroll to the bottom. To tonight’s message.
Met someone today. She hates me. You’d probably like her.
I stare at it for a long time. Then I type another one.
Got my schedule.
My thumb hovers over send. Then I add more.
I know what you’d say. That I should take it seriously. Show up. Do the work. Prove I’m more than the headlines.
I’m going to try, Dad.
Send.
The messages deliver to nowhere, same as always. But I feel lighter anyway.
Out in the living room, someone scores. Owen, probably, based on the volume of celebration. Campbell tells him to shut up. Ty’s laughing. It’s loud, wildly chaotic, and full.
Yet somehow, my brain keeps wandering back to a plant shop.
Thirty minutes with a woman who didn’t care that I play hockey and a kid who apparently loves the sport more than anything. That felt like something worth paying attention to.
I set my phone on the nightstand, lie back, and stare at the ceiling.
The river’s out there somewhere beyond the windows, dark and constant. Boats are probably still cutting across it, people heading home or heading out, living their regular lives, while mine feels like it’s balancing on some kind of edge I don’t understand yet.
Monday.
I’ll figure it out on Monday.
CHAPTER 3
JULIETTE
My apartment sits in a brick building a few blocks from downtown Alexandria. I’m close enough to walk to the shop, far enough that the rent doesn’t immediately send me into a spiral—largely because Charlie mentioned an available unit in passing and then quietly made sure I met the right person.
It’s small but cozy, with just enough space for me and Theo to exhale at the end of the day.
Everything in this place has a past: the couch discovered at a yard sale that I reupholstered myself, the coffee table that’s actually an old trunk pretending to be furniture, the lamp my friend Vivian insists is “vintage” but I know is just old. Nothing matches, but it all works. Plants soften the edges—pothos trailing down the top of the fridge, a fern perched on a stool because I ran out of surfaces, a stubborn succulent clinging to life on the windowsill. The kitchen barely qualifies as one, but it smells like garlic and tomato sauce, and for tonight, that feels like enough.
“So what’s his name again?” Vivian, my best-friend-because-she-told-me-she was, says, stretched out on my couch like she pays rent here, her phone already in her hand. “S-T-O-C-K…Stockton? Stockton, right?”
“What are you doing?” I ask, narrowing my eyes as I drain the pasta.
