Maple was different. Maple had somehow gotten inside the walls. Maple had somehow made me want to be the kind of man who could tell the truth. But I had taken Maddox’s advice and I had kept the secret and I had let thirteen days pass with her sleeping next to me, trusting me, not knowing that everything between us was built on a foundation of my withholding.
The thing about secrets was that they did not stay still. They grew. They expanded. They filled the space between two people until there was no room for anything else. Not love, not trust, not the particular intimacy that came from knowing someone completely.
I had made a choice to protect her. I had made a choice to keep her in the dark. And now she was sleeping fifty feet away from me in her grandmother’s house, and she was carrying something alone because I had decided she needed to be protected from the truth of her own life.
At 5:47 a.m., Maple came out of the bedroom in one of my thermal shirts, and she found me at the kitchen table.
She did not say anything. She just looked at me—this man at her kitchen table with cold coffee and the look of someone who had not slept—and she understood that I was carrying something. That I was counting the hours the way she had been counting hers. That we were both stuck in the liminal space between knowing and telling, between suspicion and certainty.
She did not ask me what I was doing there. She went to the coffee maker and she made fresh coffee and she poured me anew mug and she sat across from me and we did not say a single word for the next hour.
We just sat in the dark of her kitchen and we held the secret between us like a third person at the table.
I thought: Tomorrow. Tell her tomorrow. But tomorrow never came on schedule. Tomorrow was always one day away, always one more moment of silence, always one more hour of counting and waiting and understanding that I was building something that I did not yet know how to take apart.
Maple was three feet away.
She might as well have been a thousand miles.
17
MAPLE
Day 28 came in quiet and cold, and I was at the diner at five in the morning doing the same things I always did—starting the espresso machine, pulling the first pot of coffee, counting the cash from the register. Knox had been quiet for two days. Quieter than usual, which was saying something. He had spent the night at my kitchen table on Day 26 with the kind of look on his face that said he was carrying something he had not yet decided how to set down. He had kissed my forehead before I left for the diner. He had said he loved me. He had said nothing else. And I had been moving through the days since with a particular kind of dread, the kind that lived in my hands and my shoulders and the way my mouth tightened whenever I thought about asking what was wrong.
At 11:23 a.m., a man walked into my diner that I did not recognize.
He was maybe forty, with the particular look of someone who worked outdoors but not the kind of outdoors that came from Frostbite Falls—there was something about his skin, the way ithad been exposed to different weather, the way it carried a tan that had been earned somewhere south of Minnesota.
He ordered a black coffee and he sat at the counter and he said, “This is the place.”
I said, “The place for what.”
He said, “The Frostbite Diner. The story. Is it true that the Frostbite Falls Fury is saving the local diner? That the goalie coach showed up and saved the local girl?”
I stopped.
The coffee pot was in my hand and I stopped moving.
He said, “I’m a sports reporter. Regional stringer. I cover the minor league circuit and somebody tipped me off that there’s a human interest story up here. Small-town team, small-town diner, love story. I wanted to come up and check it out, see if there was actually something worth writing about.”
I said, “There’s not.”
He said, “That’s not what I’m hearing. I’m hearing the diner was about to go under, the bank was foreclosing, and then the Frostbite hockey team moved to town and the goalie coach—Knox, I’m told his name is Knox—stepped in and helped out. Is that true?”
I set the coffee pot down on the counter very carefully.
I said, “I need you to leave.”
He said, “I’m not trying to ambush you. I’m just trying to get the story straight. Is it true that you’re the goalie’s girlfriend?”
I said, “I’m not—that’s not what happened and I don’t know where you got your information, but it’s wrong.”
He said, “Okay. So walk me through what actually happened.”
I took the coffee off the counter and I poured it down the sink. The diner was quiet. It was 11:23 a.m., which meant it was the slow time between late breakfast and early lunch, whichmeant there were three people in here besides this man and all three of them were now very interested in this conversation.
I said, “You need to leave. Now.”
