“I’m not done.” Dry, fond, immovable. “Here’s your part. You did not turn that team down because you’re sentimental, whatever your father and Bart Linwood have decided between the two of them. I watched you at Thanksgiving, Stanley. I’ve watched you your whole life. You are not a boy who has ever been confused about hockey — not once in your life. You made that call clean, and you’re at peace with it, and if this were really about the game, you’d be annoyed tonight. You’re not annoyed. You’re destroyed.” She pauses. “And you’re destroyed because of the girl.”
My throat does something. “Yeah.”
“You turned it down because for the first time in your whole life you wanted something that was yours. Not the thing we picked. Not the thing anyone else thinks is best. Something you chose, on your own, with nobody’s hand on it but yours.” She lets it sit. “And now a roomful of frightened people are telling you that you have to give it back to keep the career — and you’re believing them. Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare, Stanley. The people who tell you that you have to choose are the ones who never figured out how to hold two things at the same time.”
She has no idea how literally true it is — something that was yours. She thinks she’s talking about a girl I’ve loved out in the open for months. She doesn’t know the girl started as a lie and turned into the only honest thing in my life. But it goes into a lock I didn’t know was there and it turns.
“You’re sharp,” she says, softer. The highest thing she’s got, and she doesn’t spend it loosely. “So be sharp about this one, too. Don’t let them sell you the false choice. That’s all I’ve got.”
Somewhere in the middle of it — I don’t know exactly when — headlights swing onto the street, and a car pulls in three doors down, and I watch Aspen get out.
I watch her cross the little stretch of sidewalk to her door, small and straight-backed and alone, keys in her fist. The porch light catches her for a second. The door opens and closes.
Her bedroom light comes on a moment later. A while later, it goes off. And sitting there watching her windows go dark with my mother’s voice still in my ear, the whole thing turns over, and I finally see the play — not the one she ran on me, I still can’t see all of that — but the bigger one.
She thinks she’s the anchor.
She has it exactly backwards.
The career was never the thing in danger. Mom’s right — I’m going pro, I was always going pro, fall instead of Februarychanges the size of the headline and not one other thing. Hockey was never at risk. There was exactly one thing put on the table to be destroyed tonight, one real thing in danger, and it’s the single thing in my entire life I ever picked for myself — and I’ve been sitting in a cold truck for an hour letting her father and her fear and my own dad’s half-a-map talk me toward handing it over.
The thing every single one of them keeps calling a liability — the distraction, the reason, the anchor — is the only choice I ever made that was mine.
And I’m not giving it back. Not to Coach Linwood. Not to my dad. Not to the version of the lie that’s set up shop inside her own head and convinced her she’s the one standing in my way. I have spent my whole life being told what I’m allowed to want, and I am done. I handed back a timeline that wasn’t mine on Thursday. I am not going to turn around a day later and let them take the one thing that is.
I can have both. They were never opposed. The only people who ever thought they were opposed are the people who never learned to carry two things at once. I’m not going to be one of them, and I am sure as hell not going to stand by and let her be one of them either.
And then I hit the brakes, hard, because everything in me wants to be out of this truck and across those forty feet and on her step right now.
I don’t move.
Two reasons, and I make myself hold both. One, I chased her on the porch, and I learned what chasing twice costs. Two, and bigger — what she said in that hallway was not an argument. I keep wanting it to be one, because I’m good at arguments. I could win an argument. I could stand on her step and lay out my mother’s whole case and be right. But she didn’t crash this over a fact she got wrong. She crashed it because she believes, somewhere older and deeper than tonight, that she could be inthe way of an NHL career. That’s not something I can undo with a speech at eleven o’clock at night.
I can’t tell her she isn’t the anchor. She won’t hear it. She’s heard words before. Words are part of what got her here.
I have to prove it.
And I don’t know how yet. That’s the honest truth of where I’m sitting. I’ve got the decision and not one piece of the plan. I know I’m not signing early. I know I’m not letting her go. I know the next move can’t be a chase or a speech. It has to be something that takes the belief apart at the root, rather than arguing with the branches.
I just don’t know what it is yet.
The call ends, and I’m clearer than I’ve been in days.
I take my phone out and look at her name. And I don’t text her.
That’s the discipline. Crowding her tonight is a bad mistake. She needs a night without me. So I put the phone down and let her keep the distance she’s sure is going to save me. She thinks she did the loving thing tonight — walked away to save me from herself. She’s going to find out she’s wrong about that. I just have to work out how to prove it.
I sit in the truck for a long time, watching the dark window three doors down.
Chapter 36
Aspen
I’ve done this before — the ceiling, the dark, the replaying. Except the last time I lay awake like this, three years ago, it was because something had been done to me. Tonight I did it to myself, and I keep waiting for that to make it feel different, better, like a thing I held the reins on. It doesn’t. It feels exactly the same.
That’s the part I can’t get around as the window goes from black to gray. I spent a lot time expecting he’d be like the rest. I thought I’d wake up and discover he was never going to take me seriously, that all of this had been one of his jokes. And now the morning’s here, gray and quiet and unbearable, and the aloneness sitting on my chest exactly the way I always knew it would is because of my own choices. There’s no one to be angry at but myself.
I did the right thing. I removed myself. A man like that, a career like that –– my father has not once in his life been wrong about hockey. I pull up the text again. Get his head right before he throws it away. It started off as fake, sure, but it got real inthe hotel, so as long as I’m a variable, then walking away wasn’t cruelty. It was the kindest thing I had in me. I did a good thing. I read it four times, needing it to be true.
