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Cam: Can we video call when you’re away?

Jari: Yes

My phone started ringing.

I didn’t look at the screen. I didn’t need to. I was already smiling as I lifted it to my ear, still caught in the conversation, expecting him to be calling.

“Hey,” I said, soft, easy.

Silence. Then⁠—

“Jari.”

Fuck. My father. My stomach dropped so fast it felt like a physical blow. The smile slid off my face as if it had never been there at all, and I sat up, the sheets tangling around my legs, suddenly too warm, too confining.

“What do you want?” I asked my father in a voice that didn’t sound like mine.

“Rumor is,” he said, smooth as oil, “the Railers are signing you, and not to a two-way contract. Color me shocked, they want to keep you despite your lack of staying in one place for longer than a season.”

I closed my eyes. “Rumors,” I said. “That’s what you’re calling it now?”

A gentle exhale down the line. Amused. Satisfied. “Your agent mentioned it.”

My jaw clenched. Emmet Hughes didn’t report to my father. Not officially. But Dad had always had a way of making people think they did. I didn’t like Emmet; he was yet another product of my dad’s intervention in my career, and I’d been too tired to argue.

“I need a new agent,” I muttered under my breath.

“How much?” he went on. “They don’t trade a player like you just to bury him. A million? Less?” This wasn’t about pride. Or legacy. Or even hockey. This was about money. I stayed silent. “Whatever they offer,” he said, “you’ll need to start paying down what you owe me.”

I laughed, short and sharp. “We had a deal,” I said before he could feed me more bullshit. “I’d play hockey. I’d wear your name and number. I wouldn’t talk about you. And you’d cover Mom’s care.”

“So, you’d leave your own mother vulnerable?” he said, the chuckle tender and almost indulgent, as if he were humoring a child who didn’t understand the rules yet. He let the words hang there, heavy and deliberate, daring me to argue.

I hissed out a breath. “I do everything for her. Everything,” I said. I was playing this fucking game because she was everything to me. I took the hits, the trades, the bullshit—because it kept her safe. Because my time playing covered what my asshole of a father paid for nurses and the meds and the quiet she needed. My hand tightened around the phone.

“Well, I'm sad to report that she’s had an exacerbation. You know what that means.”

A relapse, a flare, her MS worsening one awful scene at a time. “Why did no one call me?” I asked. My voice came out rough. “I’m on her emergency contact list.”

“But it’s not you who pays the bills, son.”

I desperately wanted to cover everything, but I wasn’t good enough on any team I was on; I’d never get rid of the weight around my neck, the slurs, the hatred, and the damage I wrought on myself with my messed-up brain.

“Any money I earn will go directly to her,” I said. “You’ll never get a percentage of my life.” I remembered the whole story about Trick and his father, and how he’d paid a large portion of his salary to his father's ministry. That was not happening here. The more I earned, the more I could pay for my mom’s care and the less I'd need to rely on Aarni Lankinen.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Contracts have numbers. Numbers can be discussed. Or maybe we should discuss taking your momma out of that place and caring for her in our marital home.”

The line went dead. The ultimate threat. He’d never loved her. She certainly didn’t love him, and she needed help. He wouldn’t give her help. He’d… ignore her, hurt her… no. I stared at my phone, my hand shaking now. It was barely six in the morning here. In Finland, it would be early afternoon—just past one. She’d be awake. She wouldn’t be asleep or disoriented. That mattered. I connected with the private facility where my mom lived within seconds of his finishing.

The phone rang twice before the receptionist picked up and transferred me.

“Äiti?” I said, already standing, already pacing. “ ?”

“I’m fine, sweetheart,” she said, quick and practiced in English—her first language. She’d kept her American passport after marrying my father and later added a Finnish one, but English was the language she had given me. No matter how much my father forced Finnish into my mouth, she nudged me back toward English, gentle but insistent, as if reminding me where I came from mattered.

I was born in the US to an American mom. That should have been simple. But being half Finnish meant Aarni, and Aarni poisoned everything he touched. I’d tried—God, I’d tried—to love Finland. I visited every summer, loved the lakes, the quiet, the honesty of one of the most beautiful places on Earth. A country that deserved better than the way it had been used as a cage for my mom by my controlling father. Now, all it was to me was the place that trapped my mother, the place Aarni’s shadow still ruled, and I hated that more than I hated him.

“Just another small flare, is all.”