“Linwood,” I say.
And she looks at me like I’m the last person she wants to see.
Chapter 34
Aspen
I’m happy.
That’s the thing I’ll keep coming back to later, when I’m taking it apart, trying to find the exact second it broke, because for about forty minutes, in a packed arena on a Friday night, I was happy. I let myself be, out loud, where people could see.
I’m in the family section between Gianna and Lucy, and Gianna’s got her arm hooked through mine like we’ve done this a hundred times, narrating the warmups, telling me which of the boys did what to whom at which party, and I’m laughing the way I usually don’t, the way I haven’t in public in years. Lucy’s on my other side, quiet and warm. Somewhere in the last couple of weeks, I stopped being the coach’s daughter at the edge of things and turned into one of them, a girl whose person is down there on the ice.
Last night, he was at my window. This morning, the drop didn’t come. Tonight I’m going to watch him play, and then I’m going over to his house.
My phone buzzes in my hand. I almost smile when I see it’s my dad — surprised, because he’s got a game of his own right now, and he never texts at this time. I have the live stream ready on my phone for his game.
Dad:Heard he turned down Halifax to play out a college season. That’s a kid deciding with his heart instead of his head, and it’ll cost him a career he doesn’t get back. You’ve got his ear. Get his head right before he throws it away.
My heart sinks into my stomach. He took a moment out of his time to text me this? And that’s it? I haven’t heard from him since Thanksgiving, and this is all I get? Just an instruction. I feel sick because I understand what my father is really telling me. He believes that Stanley turned down the NHL because of me, but he’s wrong. And I can’t correct it because he thinks we’re together.
I read the text again and shiver. My dad thinks he’s got it exactly right. He thinks my name is written all over this — that I’m the one dragging Stanley down. The anchor. The gravity. The mistake he’s making with his whole future.
And that’s what my dad is naming me: the weight on a good man’s ankle. The worst thing a woman can be to a man’s career — just by existing in his orbit, just by being the thing he might have stayed for.
And then the second floor goes, the one that takes the air out of me, the one that turns this from a private grief into something with no bottom.
My father is asking me to use my influence over Stanley.
But there is no influence. There is no us. We made this up in a kitchen at a party. It’s a lie. I have no real claim on that man, no real say in his life, no standing to tell him a single thing about his career, and I’m being held responsible for all of it anyway, by the one person whose good opinion I have spent my entire life tryingto earn. He thinks I have a power I don’t have. He thinks I’m the girlfriend. And I cannot fix this because I’m not the girlfriend.
The lie has built me a box with no door. Be the girl who ruined Stanley Ermington’s career or be the girl who blew up two families with the truth. Those are my options.
And then the last realization, the cruelest, because it reaches backward.
Last night. The window. The hotel, the promise kept, the most present I have ever been inside my own body — the realest thing that has ever happened to me. And my father, in one text message, has reached all the way back and put his thumb down on every bit of it, and now I can’t hold it clean anymore. Now it reads as the thing costing Stanley his future. Now the best night of my life is the night I let a good man choose me over the thing he was born for. Selfish. That’s the thought that arrives and will not leave. I knew the offer was on the table, and I let him inside of me anyway. I was so scared that he’d leave, but it never occurred to me that he would stay for me.
The one good thing I got has gone shameful in my hands. The toast all over again — proud of the decisions she’s made — except now the decision is me, and the pride has curdled into get his head right before he throws it away.
And under all of it, my own head is saying I told you. A house on a fault line is still a house on a fault line. I knew. I drew the warning myself, and then I climbed inside the house anyway, because I wanted him.
“Okay, but watch nineteen, watch what he does on the forecheck—” Gianna’s saying, squeezing my arm, lit up, “Aspen, are you watching, this is a good line up—”
“I’m watching,” I say, and I smile. She doesn’t suspect a thing.
I smile and nod, and I make the right sounds at the right moments, and inside I am a building coming down one floor at atime. Gianna bumps my shoulder, and I lie to her with my whole face in real time, and the worst part is how good I am at it.
Lucy goes quiet beside me. I feel her look at me once, twice — Lucy, who sees things, who’s watched rooms her whole life from the edge of them the same way I have. She doesn’t say anything. But at some point, she reaches over and rests her hand on my knee for a second, light, and takes it back. Like she knows something is off.
It nearly takes me apart. The small kindness, when I have no room to take it in.
The game is happening somewhere past the glass, and I can barely keep hold of it. Color and noise and the horn and the crowd rising and sitting around me like weather. I track Stanley because my eyes won’t do anything else — his name on his back, number eleven, the way he moves, the thing about him that’s always been impossible not to watch.
And then the fight.
Blue drops his gloves right in front of us, chaos at the glass, the whole section on its feet, and Stanley’s in it before I can breathe, hauling Blue back out of it, and somebody’s fist catches him across the face. His helmet goes spinning across the ice. He bends down to get it, right below me, and he looks up, sees me, and winks.
Golden. Cocky. Blood coming up on his cheekbone and a grin on him like this is the most fun he’s had all year. Twenty minutes ago, that same wink would have undone me in the best possible way. I would have carried it around for a week.
