The dinnerat home lasted two hours. My mom had made lasagna and garlic bread and my Aunt Sarah was there and my Uncle Tom, and there were jokes and stories and several rounds of asking me about college in September and whether I was nervous or excited or ready. I ate most of what was on my plate and said the things that were expected of me and laughed at the jokes in the right places.
Afterward I climbed the stairs to my room and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark with the diploma still in my hand.
The team photo from sophomore year was on the wall where it had always been. Regionals, both of us post-win, my arm around his shoulder and his arm around mine, the kind ofgrinning that happens when you're seventeen and you've just won and the future seems like something you get to design for yourself.
I set the diploma on my desk and lay down on my back and stared at the ceiling.
There was an explanation I couldn't find. There had to be one, because people didn't just make plans and then disappear without one. People didn't pack up entire households in the week after graduation without saying a word, not to the person they'd eaten lunch with three days ago, not to the person who had been their best friend for years running. There had to be something I'd missed. Some conversation I hadn't picked up on, some sign I'd let slide past me without registering its weight.
I picked up my phone. Pulled up Soren's contact and stared at his name for a long time.
I could call again. I already knew what I'd get.
I could text. I didn't know if it would send to a dead number or just vanish.
I put the phone down face-up on the nightstand and closed my eyes and waited for sleep that wasn't coming. Outside my window the neighborhood was doing its normal nighttime things. A car going by. A dog somewhere down the street. The ordinary machinery of a world that hadn't noticed anything was wrong.
He'd made his choice. I didn't know why he'd made it, didn't know if it was about me or his family or something else entirely, didn't know if I'd said the wrong thing or missed the moment when saying the right thing might have mattered. All I had was the empty locker stall and the bare window and that automated voice cutting the line before it even had a chance to ring.
Eventually I stopped trying to find the thing I'd done wrong and just lay in the dark and let the night run out.
I never called again.
CHAPTER ONE
static on the blue line
ROOK
Present Day…
The Wolves had qualified for the playoffs, but the start had been pushed back after a brutal snow system tore through several host cities, grounding flights, damaging arena infrastructure, and throwing league scheduling into chaos. We were in limbo.
I was standing at the kitchen window of my house with a mug of coffee that had gone lukewarm in my hands, staring out at the gray stretch of ocean that rolled against the rocky shore behind my property. The snow had finally stopped falling sometime in the night, leaving everything coated in that heavy, wet silencethat only came after a storm that had overstayed its welcome. The sea was restless, churning up whitecaps that crashed and dissolved, and I watched it with the same restless energy I'd been carrying around for the past week.
The house was too quiet. Two stories, three bedrooms, hardwood floors that echoed when I walked across them alone, and a view of the Atlantic that had sold me on the place the second I'd seen it. I'd bought it two years ago, back when I'd signed my contract extension and decided I was staying in Toronto for the long haul. Back when I'd thought having space and privacy and a place by the water would make me feel settled instead of just isolated.
Next door, I could see Coach's house through the trees. My coach and one of my linemates, living twenty feet away, existing in the kind of domestic bliss that had nearly destroyed both their careers not that long ago.
The media circus when their relationship went public had been brutal. I'd watched it unfold from the inside, seen the way Coach had held the line even when the press was calling for his resignation, seen the way Jace had refused to apologize for loving someone they all wanted him to be ashamed of. They'd been ripped apart in every headline, dissected on every sports talk show, and somehow they'd come out the other side still together, still standing, still refusing to let anyone else dictate what their lives should look like.
It had done things to me, watching that. Made me think about what people survived when the alternative was losing the person who mattered most. Made me wonder what I would have survived if I'd been given the chance thirteen years ago instead of just an empty house and a lifetime of wondering what the hell I'd done wrong.
My phone buzzed on the counter behind me, and I turned to look at it without much interest. Probably Dmitri asking ifI wanted to hit the gym, or Finn sending me some unhinged meme he'd found at three in the morning. But when I picked it up and saw the name on the screen, my stomach dropped in a way that had become familiar over the years.
Leroy Donnelly. Private Investigator.
I'd hired him four years ago, right after I'd been named captain and realized I finally had the money and resources to do what I'd been wanting to do since I was eighteen. Find Soren. Figure out where he'd gone, why he'd left, and whether he was even still alive. The first year had been full of false leads and dead ends. The second year had been more of the same. By year three, Leroy had stopped calling unless he had something concrete, which meant he almost never called. And now, year four, I'd been ready to tell him to stop looking. To let it go. To accept that some people disappeared because they wanted to stay gone, and chasing ghosts was a waste of time and money and the parts of me I'd been trying to rebuild.
I answered the call and brought the phone to my ear. “Leroy.”
“Rowan.” His voice was measured, professional, the same tone he always used when he was about to deliver bad news gently. “Do you have time to meet today?”
That was new. Usually he just gave me updates over the phone.
“I was going to call you soon anyway,” I said, leaning back against the counter and running my free hand through my hair. “I've been thinking maybe it's time to stop. It's been four years, and we've got nothing to show for it.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then Leroy said, “I'd like to show you what I found before you make that decision. Can you meet me at the coffee shop on Harborview in an hour?”
