It felt like proof.
I was training every day now. Controlled lifts. Conditioning. Skating drills. No contact yet, because apparently medical professionals hated joy, but my legs were back under me, my shot had not deserted me, and Coach Little had already started muttering about September preseason like he was trying not to smile.
I would be more than ready.
Not because I needed to prove Luke Dempsey had not ended my career.
He hadn’t.
I ended him.
Bam.
Facts.
I was still here.
And tonight, everyone I loved was in my parents’ penthouse for their farewell party, which was a sentence I would not have believed six months ago for several reasons.
First, because I had not loved that many people six months ago.
Second, because my parents had not been the kind of people who inspired farewell parties unless someone was retiring from a board of directors.
Third, because Harrison and Elenore Mercer were leaving Saginaw tomorrow, moving back to Manhattan, and I already knew I was going to miss them.
That one still fucked me up if I thought about it too long.
The penthouse was loud now in a way it had never been when my parents first bought it. Not because the space had changed, though Bliss had made sure it did. The cold expensive neutrals had been replaced by texture, warmth, blanketsthrown over chair backs, vases of fresh flowers, framed photos, a ridiculous neon-pink-and-yellow abstract piece my mother pretended to be skeptical about before hanging it in the main living room anyway. There were candles on the shelves, throw pillows in colors my father claimed had names that sounded “made up and aggressive,” and a massive framed picture of Bliss laughing at something my mother had said while the two of them stood in a kitchen covered in flour from some disastrous baking attempt.
My father had hung that one himself.
Bliss Bennett had come into my life like glitter with a weapon and somehow turned Harrison and Elenore Mercer into actual parents.
Not perfect ones. Not magically rewritten ones. But present. Warm. Trying.
A tight, formidable little unit none of us knew how to be until she walked into the middle of us and refused to let love stay quiet.
She had become the magnet. The impossible center. The bright, chaotic, bossy thing that pulled the three of us into a family and made it stick.
Now my parents were going back to Manhattan because my father’s empire apparently could not run forever on video calls and intimidation alone, and my mother’s patience for “living out of a temporary closet like a displaced socialite” had finally reached its natural limit.
It was going to suck not having them one floor above us anymore.
Which was another sentence I would have once considered evidence of a traumatic brain injury.
They were not leaving completely, though. Because apparently once Elenore Mercer decided to become emotionally invested, she did it with real estate.
They had bought a cottage on a lake outside Saginaw.
“Cottage,” of course, was a rich-person lie. It was less cottage and more luxury lodge that had gone to finishing school, with stone fireplaces, lake views, a kitchen bigger than Daniel Bennett’s entire dining room, and enough guest bedrooms to house a minor royal family. According to my mother, it was “small and manageable,” which meant it only had one staircase wide enough for a wedding procession and a dock that looked like it should have its own staff.
Bliss had seen pictures and stared at my mother for a full ten seconds.
“That is not a cottage, Elenore.”
My mother had blinked, then looked down at the glossy brochure. “It has wood beams.”
“Ma’am, so does a ski resort.”
