Page 79 of Blueline Baby

“No.” I pull her in against my chest. “I have my two girls. I have everything I’ve ever wanted.”

Chloe lets out a soft, shaky breath. She presses a long, slow kiss over my heart and wraps her arm across my chest.

“Okay,” she whispers into the dark. “Me too.”

I close my eyes and pull the blankets up over her shoulders, and I lie there listening to her breathing slow down.

My whole life, wanting more is how I knew myself. More ice, more goals, more of whatever came next. So when she asked, I went looking for the want because it’s always there. And now it’s not.

There’s a baby girl asleep down the hall who’s going to grow up in the family room at that arena, tiny headphones, twenty terrible uncles. If a hockey player ever gets ideas about her someday, I’ve got a whole roster to help me run him out of the state. But it won’t come up. She’s going to be sensible, like her mother. She’d never.

And there’s a woman asleep on my chest that I would still drive to Louisiana for, tonight, no questions asked.

Everything I’ve got finally has somewhere to go. All of it, for the rest of my life.

Turns out that’s the only thing I ever wanted.

CHLOE

Jack’s phone starts buzzing on the counter while he’s flipping Mackie’s Saturday morning pancakes, and I glance at it out of habit. It’s June, so it’s not the team. Probably Jude, who calls every single morning like the two of them don’t already text all day. Or his mom, wanting to lock down our lake dates for July. But Jack picks it up, and I watch his whole posture change when he says his agent’s name.

He listens for a minute then he says, “Both of us?” and looks at me across the kitchen, and I know before he even hangs up that everything is about to change.

That’s how we find out Jack and Jude have been traded to Seattle.

I don’t cry. I place a notebook on the kitchen table and start writing down logistics. School districts. Commute times from different neighborhoods to the practice facility. What it costs to ship an entire life thousands of miles northwest. I cried that night in the shower, where nobody could hear me and offer to fix it, and then I came back out with wet hair and added three more things to the list.

Mackie took the news better than both of us combined. She asked if Seattle has hockey, if she could bring her new bed, and if Uncle Dean was coming too, then she went back to her cartoon like nothing was changing.

We’ve been packing the house for two weeks now. We bought it when Mackie was one, when the townhouse got too small for us, and now the whole thing is disappearing into cardboard one room at a time. Yesterday I taped up a box with the green Gordie onesie and a pair of tiny hockey skates in it and had to go sit on the stairs for a few minutes before I could keep going.

Today I come down with the tape gun and find that packing has stopped entirely.

Jack is sitting on the living room floor with a pink bow clipped in his hair. Mackie is bent over his bare foot with a bottle of blue nail polish, her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration.

“We’re taking a break,” Jack says.

“Daddy’s nails were chipped,” Mackie says without looking up.

“There’s a bow in your hair,” I tell him and he lifts a tiny teacup at me in acknowledgement.

I’m the one who packs his dresser, because I’ve been asking him to do it for the past few days and he keeps putting it off. I’m working through the bottom drawer, under the t-shirts he never wears but won’t throw out, when my fingers touch something smooth and plastic.

It’s a sandwich bag, zipped shut and inside is a small square napkin. I know before I even turn it over exactly what it is and the tears come before I feel them building. I sink down onto the carpet and let it all wash over me.

His messy handwriting with his underlines and circles of the things that were so important to him that night. The plans he made for my dreams before even thinking of his own. I think about how wildly things have changed since then.

I never went to vet school, which is the only thing Jack and I have ever truly fought about. He told me he felt like I was giving up my dreams and he was the reason. What he couldn’t understand is that somewhere in those first few months with a newborn and his travel schedule and then when he made the final roster for the Olympics that my dream had turned into something else entirely and I made a choice.

Most days I’d make that choice again without blinking. And then days like today I find a memory like this and it comes at me sideways.

I don’t hear him come in. One second I’m alone on the floor, and the next his arms are coming around me, pulling me into his chest, his chin settling on top of my head like it’s the spot it was made for.

“You kept it,” I manage against his shirt.

“Of course I kept it.” He says quietly. “You know, Seattle has a vet school. If that’s still what you want.”

My heart squeezes so hard it aches because this man has spent the past six years putting me and our daughter first and it’s something that comes so naturally to him that he would never think twice about the sacrifice he would have to make.