Page 4

I swallow and close my eyes tighter. “I hit my head on the ice. I think I have a concussion.”

“Did anyone look you over?” I shake my head and Harris curses under his breath, then says something quietly to his wife, before speaking softly to me again. “Fucking Anders.”

I want to laugh, but I can barely keep my body upright in his grip. I’m too large for him to hold me, but he is, and I feel like a kid. Sahara pulls a car up to the emergency lane and pops out of the front seat, helping her husband usher me inside the back seat.

Head pressed against the cold window, I start to drift off to the distant sound of Mrs. Harris’s voice. “You should’ve heard what he was saying to the kid. He’s got nowhere to go, Nate. Let me take him back to Waterfell, just for the night . . .”

Closing my eyes, I focus on the same little pocket of dreams in the back of my brain, letting the images of a small redheaded girl in a garden play over my mind’s eye.

“Lily,” I breathe. A sigh, prayer, and plea all at once.

Lily. Lily with paint on her cheeks and a grin too broad to be real—I graze my fingertips over her lips just to be sure.

Lily at seven years old, finding me in a rainy garden scene, leading me to a playhouse, and putting a bandage over the cut on my cheek. Kissing it briefly, “Because that’s what makes it heal. Like magic.”

Again, at twelve, my first fight in a hockey game, my body on lilac sheets while she puts antiseptic over scrapes and tends to my bruises. Thirteen and cutting my hand on the brick and trellis climbing into her room, my only solace. Fifteen and busting my knuckles on the face of some preppy kid who called her weird. Sixteen, dancing to Jeff Buckley, distracted by the desperate thing in my chest thumping like it might reach out and wrap her into my skin.

Part of me feels like I did, that she lives inside me.

I focus there, smiling softly, and I swear I can feel her hands on my skin again, gentle and careful with me in a way no one else ever was.

But it’s not real. I’m concussed and delusional.

And I’ll never have her again.

Chapter 1

SENIOR YEAR, January

Toren

“Toren Kane . . .” Coach Harris sighs, flipping a page over again on my record.

We’ve been sitting in restrained silence for the last several minutes, but neither of us cracked. So he’s taken up a new tactic.

“Transferred between three schools in the last two years, up for NHL draft sophomore year, passed over after being benched by your team for showing up to a game drunk—underaged. Multiple fights with teammates, one resulting in another player withdrawing from the team.”

I smile, reaching up to wipe a small amount of blood dripping from my split lip.

“Every time I’m in here you read me the list—big fan of my work?”

My words have their intended effect, igniting the slight fury beneath the calm outer shell of our always even-keeled coach. Most of the other coaches I’ve played for would’ve resorted to physical violence with me by now.

Somehow, Coach Harris hasn’t. Yet.

“Your ego knows no bounds, Kane.” He sighs again, but it doesn’t have the intended effect. Disappointment from authority figures—hell, anyone really, means nothing to me. “You could’ve been playing in the NHL at eighteen, Kane. But you—”

“Don’t,” I snap. He backs off, hands raised.

“Fine,” he says. “You broke McKill’s nose, Toren. I can’t just sit back and do nothing.”

I knew I’d hit Mason McKill hard; still, I didn’t think it would break anything. Besides, I’d only hit him because he’d been shit talking me on the ice all goddamn morning and I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Shouldn’t you be in a prison cell?” I’d let that one go, staying focused on prepping, stretching out my muscles, pretending my headphone volume was loud enough not to hear what the junior defenseman was spouting.

“C’mon, Kane,” he’d tried again on our way down the hall toward the lockers. “Share your side with us. Maybe we won’t hate you so fucking much, huh?”

There was a laugh, one that made my shoulders tighten, like a hand grabbing me by the back of the neck.