Finn got in the truck and drove home through the snow. The heat took a while to kick in. The streets were hushed, porch lights behind bare trees. By the time he pulled into his apartment complex, his hands had stopped shaking.
Finn sat in the cab, engine idling. His lip throbbed where Evan’s teeth had caught it. He pressed his tongue to the bruise and tasted copper.
Tomorrow there’ll be practice. The same routine. The draft was getting closer every time he stepped on the ice.
Tomorrow he’d be angry.
Finn went inside, took a shower until the hot water gave out, and fell asleep with his phone on the nightstand, face up, the screen black.
12
EVAN
Evan called Claire at two in the morning.
He didn’t decide to. His thumb found her name and the phone was ringing and then her voice was there, thick with sleep, saying his name once like a question. Evan opened his lips and nothing came out that qualified as language. He was on the couch. Same couch since early evening, cushions cool under him, coffee gone cold on the table, a book open to a page he hadn’t read. The house was motionless. The furnace cycled in the basement. Winter light from the street came through the front windows, thin and blue, warming nothing.
“Evan,” Claire said again. Not a question this time.
“I’m here.”
“Okay.” She sat up somewhere, her sheets rustling through the line. “Talk to me.”
“I think I—” Evan stopped. Started again. “There’s a situation. At work. It’s not a work situation, it’s—I don’t know what it is.”
“Okay.”
“I did something. Or I didn’t do something. I don’t know which one is worse.”
Claire waited.
“Someone needed me to be different and I wasn’t. I was just. Me. The same as always. And it wasn’t enough.”
“Who needed you to be different?”
Evan’s jaw locked. The furnace cycled. The tap dripped.
“Someone,” he said.
“Evan.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You called me.”
He pressed his forehead into his palm. The phone was hot at his ear and his breathing was wrong and Claire was three hours away in her apartment and she was the only person on the planet he would do this in front of, and he couldn’t get the name out. He talked around it for what must have been twenty minutes, circling the shape of it without ever landing, and Claire held the line the way she’d held everything he’d ever given her: without flinching. She’d been doing it since they were teenagers and he’d told her first, before anyone, sitting on the hood of her car in the parking lot behind the grocery store with his fists in his lap and his jaw aching from clenching it. She had saidokaythen too. She had said okay and handed him her Slurpee and they’d sat there until the sun went down.
When Evan’s breathing went wrong, Claire stayed on the line and didn’t hang up until it evened out.
Then she said: “Who is he?”
Evan’s throat closed. He pressed his thumb into the couch cushion and the upholstery gave under the pressure and thehouse was so silent around him that Claire’s breathing through the phone was the loudest thing in the room.
“Claire—”
“You just spent twenty minutes not saying his name. So I’m asking.” Her voice was gentle and immovable. “Who is he, Evan?”
“I don’t know where to start.”
