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I keep scrolling and come across a book titled “Mighty Pucks.” I read the first sentence of the description and discover it is a romance, but it’s about a professional hockey player… so how bad could it be?

I tap the play button on my phone and it starts reading to me through my bathroom speakers, which are connected to my phone’s audio. I adjust the volume and set my phone on the bathroom counter.

I’m ready to relax. Looking at the prissy bathtub filled with pink bubbles, I second guess this entire thing.

“What the hell,” I grumble, removing the towel draped around my waist and letting it fall to the floor. I step one leg inside the tub, then the other. Okay, not so bad. I allow myself to sink into a sitting position.

I am one with the tub. I am relaxed. This is my new hobby.

The audio book gets past the beginning credits and starts reading to me from the man’s point of view. He’s on the team’s private jet, flirting with the coach’s daughter.

I snort a laugh. “A coach's daughter would never travel with the team.”

I keep listening, and they keep flirting. The coach’s daughter invites the player to meet her in the plane’s bathroom in five minutes.

“What the… what kind of book is this?”

It continues and he’s trying to figure out how to slip into the bathroom with miss-hot-pants without his teammates, or coach, noticing. This would literally never happen. I don’t know whether to laugh, or to jump out of the tub and stop the audiobook from continuing.

But I decide to stick it out and give this thing a chance. Hopefully, it’ll turn around soon.

It doesn’t. He magically sneaks past all the guys on the small plane and they shut themselves inside the tiny airplane bathroom.

“That’s unsanitary,” I whisper to myself.

I try to stay relaxed and close my eyes, thinking someone will come knock on the door and interrupt them before this book gets a little too wild for me. But no… the two of them start making out and removing clothing. Things are progressing very quickly—there’s no way a large hockey player could accomplish all this in an airplane lavatory—I fly out of the tub to stop the book.

Hot water and bubbles splatter all over the floor as I run for the phone, yelling, “No, no, no!”

I can’t move fast enough, not wanting to slip and land on my butt, and things start happening in this book that I’m wholly unprepared for.

Finally, I reach my phone and stop the book just as the hockey player tells the coach’s daughter she's a good girl.

“If she’s such a good girl, why’s she doing that two feet away from her dad? And in a lavatory? Gross.”

I slip and slide back to the tub and get back in the hot water, this time with my phone in hand. Scrolling through the options of books, again, I find a John Wayne biography and start playing that one instead. I breathe a sigh of relief when the first chapter passes without anything steamy.

Pretty soon, I’m interested in the book, enjoying the narrator and the details about John Wayne’s life. I think of my granddad, and the time we spent watching John Wayne’s films together. He would’ve enjoyed this book. I find myself sinking deeper in the tub and smiling to myself.

My eyes open when it hits me… I’m thinking of my granddad and smiling. Normally, when thoughts of my family slink into my mind unbidden, all I feel is that tightness in my chest. That old feeling of bitterness and anger. That overwhelming loneliness that takes over my body and makes me want to break something.

But today is different.

I know my anger and resentment won’t heal in one month, or even one year. But for the first time in years, I feel something new.

Something that seems a lot like hope.

* * *

“Mitch ‘The Machine’! Good to see you in the house,” Tom Parker says, his face genuinely happy—and maybe a little surprised—as he reaches a hand out to me.

I shake his hand and he pats my shoulder. “I was thrilled when you reached out for tickets. I thought maybe you didn’t miss us at all.” He winks. “Looking good, by the way.”

Tugging at my tie nervously, I grunt my thanks. It’s been a month since I wore one of my custom-tailored game-day suits, and it feels a little weird. Tonight, I selected the one that is the most fitted, showing off my muscled arms (Andie seems to like my arms… or maybe it’s just the tattoos). The suit is a dark forest green with a subtle gold pattern, and the golden, silk tie matches. I admit, “I didn’t want to draw attention by coming to the games.”

Tom shrugs. “You’ll have to be back in the limelight sooner or later. So tell me, how are the Washington Wombats? I bet they’ll miss having you around when you come back to us in a week.”

“I doubt that,” I say dryly. “But… it hasn’t been as bad as I expected.”