Chapter 3 #2
I slump back against the couch, dragging a hand over my face.
“No. They were…they weren’t like that. They didn’t have personal details.
They were…more like therapy. When the first letter came, it was just telling me how my book made him feel.
How the words spoke something that seemed to come from his own heart.
After that, after I wrote back, we just sort of kept writing.
The letters were almost philosophical, in a way.
Vulnerable. Honest. The kind of honest that spills out fast and unedited. As if…he was discovering something.”
“Like what?”
“Himself.” I stare at the ceiling. “But nothing, never in my wildest dreams was there anything that made me think the writer might be Beckett Benson.”
“Everly—”
“Why couldn’t it be someone else?” My voice comes out thin. Pathetic. “Why couldn’t my anonymous pen pal be, I don’t know, a schoolteacher? A firefighter? A cheesemonger?—”
“A cheesemonger?”
“—or literally anyone other than the one person on earth who represents everything hockey took from me.”
“I’m sorry, love.”
“You want to know the cherry on top?” Or maybe the frosting would be more fitting.
“He ended up driving me home. My dad put him up to it, and I had to accept when I couldn’t get an Uber.
He was…perfectly civil. He even offered to go get us cookies.
Cookies, Julia.” I drop my head, the very memory sucking away my energy.
“I don’t know what to do.” My voice is a whisper.
“The next time I get one of his letters.”
“Evie, you can’t let him find out.” Her voice shifts. Takes on that careful, measured quality she uses before she delivers a closing argument. Julia the attorney. Julia who weighs evidence and wins.
“Of course.”
“No, Everly. Listen. To. Me.” Each word lands separately, deliberate. “He can never find out that you are Sutton Blake. He can never find out that you’ve been reading his letters.”
“I know—”
“Because if he finds out, he won’t just be hurt.
He’ll be destroyed. You read what he wrote.
He already believes people only value him for what he does.
He already believes vulnerability gets punished.
If he discovers that the one person he trusted with his real self is the coach’s daughter who blames him for her broken family, who studied him for a novel—”
“I didn’t study him for a—”
“It won’t matter what it was. It’ll matter what it looks like.
And what it looks like is the worst possible confirmation of everything he already believes about himself.
And if he takes it to the press, if anybody finds out, you’re going to look like the bad guy here. And your career will be in shambles.”
The words land in my chest like dropped anchors. Because she’s right. Of course she’s right. Julia is always right when you desperately need her to be wrong.
“So what do I do?”
“You keep the secret. You maintain distance. You for sure do not eat a cookie with him. You keep your head down and write your book, turn it in to Margot, and you move on with your life.”
“And the letters?”
“You keep writing back as S.B. You keep it warm but professional. You do not let it get more personal than it already is. It’ll blow over; he’ll stop writing eventually.”
“And if he does find out?”
“He won’t.” Her mug thumps against the counter. “Because you’re not going to let him.”
I look at the TV. Luke is fixing something in Lorelai’s house. Lorelai is pretending she doesn’t need him to fix it. They’re standing in the same kitchen, breathing the same air, and lying to themselves about what they feel.
“He can never know,” I say.
“Never.”
“I’ll keep my distance.”
“Good.”
“I’ll write back as S.B. Keep it professional.”
“Perfect.”
“I won’t eat cookies with him.”
“There’s my girl.”
We say goodbye, and I hang up and let out a sigh. On the screen, Lorelai says something quippy in a diner, and Luke puts on a show of not reacting. Never letting on how much she means to him. I really hate this show.
Outside, the snow falls past the tall Tudor windows, and the furnace kicks on. And somewhere across Minneapolis, Beckett Benson is sitting in an apartment that I’m guessing looks nothing like this—nothing warm, nothing collected, nothing soft—writing a letter to a woman he thinks is a stranger.
I go upstairs to my office. The research wall stares back at me. Beckett’s section. Action shots clipped from the Star Tribune. Magazine clippings. The printed timeline of the doping scandal pinned with blue tacks.
I should take it down.
But I don’t.
Instead, I sit at my desk. I open my laptop. I look at the manuscript and read through my last scene with Jake, my hero.
Then I think about five letters in a box under my bed, written by a man who believes the best version of himself only exists on paper.
And I think about my bare wrist, where my bracelet used to be—the tiny book charm Mom gave me for my twenty-first birthday.
For my girl who carries stories everywhere she goes.
Gone. Lost in the same night I found out that the most honest person in my life is someone I’ve been keeping secrets from for six months—not out of malice but because I never knew who he was until tonight.
I close the laptop. Go to bed, then pull the covers over my head.
This feels like the only option, doesn’t it?
BECKETT
In my line of work, anger has exactly one useful application: converting it into something that puts points on the board.
Crack.
The puck ricochets off the goalpost.
“Benson.” Wyatt caught the puck and now flips his mask up. Sweat drips off his chin. “You want to talk about it, or do you want to keep trying to send me to the morgue?”
I dig my blades in, skate back to the blue line. Shoot. “Option B.”
“Cool. Just checking.” He tosses the puck onto the ice, and it’s picked up by Tyler, passed back to the middle to Candy, who takes it in stride, shields it for half a second, then feeds it wide to Kalen Boomer on the left. Conrad picks off the pass, spins, fires it ahead to me.
I don’t think. I just move.
I read the ice the way other people read rooms. Blake is already on my left, the rookie’s speed putting him exactly where I need him when I pass it off without looking. Justin “Blade” Blake has one setting—Go. I just point him at the net.
He goes.
Derek Munson closes fast—because Derek is good, whatever else is true—and Blake cuts inside, loses the angle. Dishes it back blind.
I’m there. Conrad’s already sealed off Boomer on the weak side. All that quiet patience, four years of knowing exactly where I’m going to be. The lane is open for half a second.
I shoot.
Wyatt goes left. Puck goes right.
It should go in. It doesn’t. The puck hits the crossbar with a crack that echoes through the rafters, and Toby—my accountability partner, the man with the clipboard, the walking evidence of my ongoing disgrace—scribbles something without looking up.
Probably Subject appears unhinged. Recommend additional supervision.
“Benson! Ease up!” Coach Hart’s voice cracks from behind the boards. “This is a positioning drill, not a demolition derby.”
My stick cracks against the ice. “Yeah, Coach.”
It’s been three days since the gala, and I still can’t get my head right. Can’t get that one syllable out of my head. No. I don’t know why I even tried.
It’s fine. I’ve already written her off. Just another person who sees the version of me they want to see. I circle the rink. Return to position.
Across the rink, Cole Thompson is having another hushed conversation on his phone. When Brody skates past, Cole stuffs the phone away so fast he fumbles it against the boards, then plasters on a grin that wouldn’t convince a golden retriever.
I’ve been watching him for months—since he accused me of doping (framed is more like it), watched my career catch fire, and stood back and let it happen.
But lately, something’s changed. He’s checking his phone between drills.
He’s dropped fifteen pounds he didn’t have to lose.
And today, before practice, I spotted him in the parking lot with two men who looked a long way from friendly.
His eyes caught mine, and for that split second, I saw the look of a drowning man searching for dry land.
Then, just as quickly, the look was gone, replaced by cool stone.
I should say something. But the last thing I need is to draw attention three weeks before contract renewal meetings. He’s on his own.
Practice ends, and all I want is to get out of here. I shower, change into street clothes, reach for my suit jacket, and fish in the pocket for my parking pass.
My fingers close around something else. Small. Delicate. A chain so fine it’s barely there.
A silver bracelet with a tiny charm—a miniature book, no bigger than my thumbnail, with pages that actually open. The clasp is broken, snagged on a thread of my jacket lining.
I stare at it a moment, and I’m back in the elevator with the woman who said I believe in good stories, then vanished before I could ask her name. She exited so fast—practically a sprint—that I never saw her face.
I close my fist around it. Pocket it.
“Beckett.” Coach materializes in the doorway. “There’s a Farewell Skate event Saturday at Sutton Arena. I need you there.”
My memory flashes to the old arena where I learned to skate. It’s where Dad practiced before the accident. Where Coach found me doing crossovers alone at six a.m.
Too many memories, and that’s the last place I want to go. But…I owe a lot to Sutton Arena. To Coach. I swallow my objection. “Yeah. I’ll be there.”
“Two p.m. Don’t be late.” He stops. One hand on the doorframe. “Everly might be there too.”
Perfect. “Super. Can’t wait.”
He looks at me a beat longer than is comfortable, one brow rising. “I thought you two used to be friends.”
He did? But I nod. “Yep.”