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Maybe that’s why I keep him so tightly locked away.

“He left the home I was in when I was seven,” I say, pressing on the wound a little longer. Maybe bleeding it out will make it finally fade. Make it not hurt so deeply. “Just left for school one day and didn’t come back.”

Something about Harris’s presence pulls the rest from me, though I can feel something inside me fighting it back, as if telling him, displaying this weak spot is dangerous. And maybe it is, but I can’t help it. “I was really angry about that for a long time. He just . . . he just left me there and I would’ve never done that. I didn’t leave Lily even when I wanted to.”

I press my hand into my eyes then. Why did I say that?

Don’t fucking cry. Stop it.

“So you’ve known Lily a long time, hmm?”

“Since I was seven,” I offer. “I was angry and hiding somewhere I shouldn’t be and she found me.”

It’s an oversimplification. And half the time I’m not even sure that part is true, but it was the day Henry didn’t come home and the first time my foster dad whaled on me with his fists. I wondered for years after that if he’d hit Henry one too many times and he’d left because of it.

Another turning point in my life, and her at the center.

How many memories of Lily are half dipped in sadness and anger?

No matter how pure and separate I try to keep them, it feels like everything of us is splotched, all half-faded photographs with dark spots and sun exposure damage.

“What about you?” I ask, desperate to turn the attention away from me. “Why didn’t you keep playing? After college?”

He clears his throat. “I did. I played a season with Seattle. And then, Sahara miscarried. Twice. And then again when we tried IVF. And . . . she wasn’t okay. She wouldn’t have asked, but I didn’t want to be away from her after that. For a while”—he shakes his head and I don’t miss the way his eyes water before he rubs at them—“I just didn’t think she’d find her way out of it. There was a lot of anger and fighting and . . . I never went back. We moved here. Things got better.”

“You could have played again.”

He shrugs then. “Maybe. I just didn’t have the drive anymore. And I liked coaching more.”

Biting my lip, I nod. “You’re good at it. And I’ve had a lot of coaches, so—you can trust me on that. You’re a really good coach.”

Harris takes a heavy breath in, his chest deflating slowly as he puts a hand to my shoulder and keeps me turned toward him.

“You’re a good kid, Tor,” he says. “And for some reason you’ve had a lot of people telling you that you weren’t. I’m sorry.”

His hand squeezes my shoulder again before he skates to grab the pucks from around the goal. I reach up to rub at my chest, wondering for a moment if I’m bleeding out.

“Want a ride home?” he says, before turning to head off the ice.

“Yeah.”

I wonder if he knows it’s the first time he’s called it “home” for me.

Chapter 45

Lily

It’s late and the only thing lighting my workspace is a lamp against a far wall. Music plays softly on my phone.

I’m in the room that still has a Do Not Enter sign posted outside. As far as I know, Paloma hasn’t tried to open the small extra office space. I keep the windows shuttered, but it doesn’t have a lock. Besides, if she had dared to open it, I’m sure she wouldn’t understand what everything truly meant.

Half the room is a scattered mess of all my favorites now half pulled from their spots they once hung carefully on the wall. Piles of paintings I finished but never managed to find a spot for are leaned against one of the walls. Messily painted-over indigos and deep purples, almost midnight black, which now coats my hands because I’m painting it again.

Only it’s not right.

So I toss it to the side and try again.

This time a different medium—grabbing for charcoal and my roughened sketch book—