Chapter 24
Carrie
I'd been at Matt's place all day, and the absurdity of the situation had not faded with familiarity.
Me. A media strategist's assistant for the White Hearts.
Sitting on the couch of a Boston Bruins player, babysitting his golden retriever and monitoring his brother's withdrawal, while the man himself was in a medical facility somewhere across town because he'd collapsed on live television trying to hold all of this together.
If anyone at my office could see this, the headline would write itself.
Mason had called that morning. Matt had collapsed during the game. Exhausted but okay. Someone needed to check on Frank. Could I come?
I was in my car before he'd finished the sentence.
Frank was quiet most of the day. Barely talked.
Just sat on the couch with a blanket over his legs and his body doing things he couldn't control, tremors that ran through him in waves, each one followed by a stillness that was almost worse.
When he did speak, his voice was raw. Like every word had to be pulled out of somewhere deep and painful.
He was pale in a way that made pale look like a medical condition. Dark circles that had graduated to bruises. His clothes hanging on a frame that had lost weight it couldn't spare. I tried to get him to eat. Made soup. Toast. Simple things. He managed a few bites before pushing the plate away.
"Not hungry."
"You need to eat."
"I need a lot of things." He managed a weak smile. "Food's pretty low on the list."
I didn't know how to help someone fighting something I couldn't see.
Couldn't research it, couldn't build a strategy around it, couldn't draft a solution the way I drafted everything else.
So I just sat with him. Let Bob curl up between us like a golden-furred buffer zone.
Let the silence hold whatever it needed to hold.
Hours. A nature documentary neither of us watched. Bob snoring. Frank's breathing uneven, then even, then uneven again.
Then he spoke.
"Bob's a good dog."
I looked over. He was running his hand along Bob's ear, slow and rhythmic, the way you'd stroke something you were afraid to hold too tight. The first real expression I'd seen from him all day.
"He is."
"Matt told me about the morning he brought Bob home from the vet.
Said Bob barked at the mailman for forty-five minutes straight.
Just stood at the window, barking at this poor guy trying to deliver packages.
Wouldn't stop until Matt held him in his lap and let him watch the mailman leave.
" Frank's smile reached his eyes, briefly.
"Matt carried a sixty-pound dog to the window like a baby. He sent me a picture."
I laughed. The image landed clean and warm, Matt holding Bob like an infant while the mailman fled.
"That sounds about right."
Frank's smile faded the way a match goes out.
Fast, and then the dark is bigger for having seen the light.
He looked away, staring at the wall. When he finally looked back at me, his eyes were wet.
Not threatening tears. Already past that.
The tears were there, running down his face, and he wasn't even trying to stop them.
"Frank—"
"I'm sorry." His voice cracked on the second word. "I'm sorry you have to see this. I'm sorry Matt has to deal with me. I'm sorry I keep being the thing that pulls him under."
I moved closer. Put my hand on his arm. Felt the tremor run through him like a current.
"Matt's going to be alright," I said. "Mason says he just needs rest. He collapsed because he hasn't slept, not because—"
"That's not what I'm worried about."
He looked at me with eyes that were Matt's eyes, same shape, same shade of blue, but filled with a pain Matt held behind a wall and Frank wore on the surface like he'd stopped trying to hide it.
"I'm not sure I can beat this," he said. "The addiction. The need that sits in my chest every single morning when I wake up and tells me today is the day I'm going to fail. And I know what happens if I can't."
He swallowed. The tears kept coming.
"I'll lose Matt. For good this time. He'll have to cut me off, and he'll be right to, and I won't blame him because I've given him every reason. But that's not the worst part."
"What's the worst part?"
"The worst part is I'll lose the chance to see him happy.
Actually happy. And he hasn't been, Carrie.
Not for a long time. Going through the motions.
Playing hockey because it's what he's supposed to do.
Winning because winning is the only thing that makes the silence in his head stop.
But not happy. Not the kind of happy that has nothing to do with a scoreboard. "
My throat closed.
"Until you."
The words landed on the exact wound I'd been protecting since the gas station. The belief that I was a net negative. That I took more than I gave. That the people around me were better off before I showed up with my ambitions and my complications and my talent for making things worse.
Frank was telling me the opposite. Frank, who had every reason to resent my presence in Matt's life, was looking at me with tears on his face and telling me I was the reason his brother had remembered how to be happy.
"He never shuts up about you," Frank said. "Seriously. Every conversation comes back to Carrie. How you make him laugh. How you challenge him. How you're the first person in years who looks at him and sees Matt, not the jersey."
My eyes burned.
"He's got these plans." Frank's voice went soft, almost tender, the voice of a man describing something precious he was afraid to jinx.
"Wants to take you to Italy because you mentioned you'd never been.
Wants to get you skiing even though you told him you hate the cold.
Wants to teach you to skate properly instead of holding onto the boards. "
The image hit me with a force I wasn't ready for.
Matt, planning a future that had me in it.
Not a season. Not a contract period. A future.
Italy and skiing and skating lessons, the small ordinary things that add up to a life, and he was building them around me while I'd been too afraid to say three words.
"He's happy," Frank whispered. "Really, genuinely happy. And I'm so goddamn terrified I'm going to ruin it for him."
I opened my mouth. Wanted to promise him he wouldn't. Wanted to tell him that Matt would get through this. That they both would. That I'd be here.
The doorbell rang.
"Frank!" Matt's voice through the door. Stressed. Urgent. "Open up!"
I stood quickly. Bob scrambled to his feet, tail going, barking his happy bark. I moved to the door, heart already hammering, and opened it.
Matt.
Still in the clothes from the medical facility. Hair everywhere. Face drawn tight over the bones. But his eyes were awake. Alert. Scanning past me into the apartment, looking for Frank, checking, always checking.
We stared at each other. For a long, suspended moment where neither of us moved or spoke. Like two people standing on opposite sides of a line neither had agreed to draw.
Deep in the part of me that was always bracing for the worst, I wondered if I was losing him.
If the collapse had been a line. If he'd woken up in that medical facility and realized that the woman from the White Hearts, the one who'd already caused him headlines and locker-room fractures and a parking-lot ambush, was one complication too many for a man already carrying his brother and his team and his career on a spine that was starting to bend.
"I'm falling in love with you too."
The words left my mouth the way a puck leaves a stick on a bad angle. No aim. No strategy. No draft review. Just the raw, graceless truth, ejected from somewhere below my professional composure, out in the open before my communications department could file an objection.
Matt looked at me.
I saw it register. The words landing on his face, surprise first, then something else, something that moved fast and deep behind his eyes.
Then he walked past me.
Didn't stop. Didn't reach for me. Didn't do any of the things the movie version of this moment would have required. Just moved into the apartment, his eyes finding Frank on the couch, his body redirecting to the one crisis it knew how to address.
"Frank? You okay? Did you eat? Did you sleep?"
"I'm fine, Matt."
"You don't look fine."
"Neither do you."
I stood in the doorway with my hand still on the knob and my heart somewhere around my shoes.
I had just said it. The thing I'd been too terrified to say for days.
The thing that had sat in my chest like a sealed letter going nowhere.
I'd finally ripped it open, read it aloud, stood in his doorway with my voice shaking and my hands cold and every defense I'd ever built stripped down to the studs.
And he'd walked past me like I was furniture.
My whole body went cold. Not angry-cold. Hollow-cold. The specific temperature of a woman who'd finally been brave enough to jump and discovered there was no one standing where they'd promised to catch.
I watched him with Frank. The way he knelt beside the couch.
The way his hands checked Frank's forehead, his pulse, the blanket.
Brothers. Broken in different ways. Both drowning, both trying to save the other, and me standing at the door with three words still hanging in the air that neither of them had heard.
I should leave. This moment didn't include me. Couldn't include me, no matter how much I wanted to be the person Matt turned to, because right now his brother needed him and the hierarchy was clear and I wasn't at the top of it and maybe I'd never been.
I picked up my coat.
Walked to the door.
Didn't say goodbye because my voice had been used up on the one thing that mattered and the one thing that mattered hadn't mattered enough.
The door closed behind me with a sound I was going to remember for a long time.