Chapter 16 #2
“I wanted to respect your boundaries,” he says.
“So I signed up as a beta reader instead. From then on out, I read every word.” He picks up Slap Shot, the second book in the series—his notes fill the margins of chapter nine, where the hero breaks down about his father.
“I was waiting for you to tell me. When you were ready.”
“I was afraid you’d be embarrassed,” I say, and it sounds like my eleven-year-old voice. Small. Breakable.
Dad’s face changes. “Embarrassed?” He says it like it’s a foreign word. “Evie. How could I ever be embarrassed by you? All I have ever been is proud. Of every version of you. And every genre.”
He picks up the manuscripts one at a time, placing them between us like evidence.
“You write about people being brave enough to love. About heroes learning they’re worthy of the thing they’re afraid to want.” He holds up Breakaway and Slap Shot. “You know who reads these? My players.”
“Your players?”
“Half the locker room has a Sutton Blake in their bag.” He smiles now.
“None of them would ever admit it. But Vasquez has read Breakaway three times. Kowalski cried during the scene where Eli calls his mother—he’ll deny it to his grave, but I caught him reading in the stands before practice.
” He pauses. “They come to practice lighter, Evie. Because your books give them permission to feel things they didn’t know they were allowed to feel.
All I did was leave a few copies out. Your writing did the rest.”
I’m staring at him. At the manuscripts. At the notes, thoughtfully, carefully fitted into the margins. And it hits me then that maybe that’s where he thought I wanted him, in the margins of my life. Out of the story.
Funny how I felt the same way, isn’t it? Or not. Really, it’s sad.
A moment passes between us, something simultaneously heavy and light. I feel like I’m seeing a part of him for the first time.
After a moment, he lets out a breath, the air shifting. “About Beckett…”
My heart sinks—here it comes.
“What he said to that reporter…” he says gently. “It’s not true. And it wasn’t true when he said it seventeen years ago.”
I blink at him a moment, trying to get my bearings. “What?”
“When he said you should stick to the stands.”
“You heard that?” I close my eyes, trying to rebuild the scene. “You weren’t there.”
“I was.” He pushes away from the sideboard.
“I was in the stands, talking to the scouts who were there that day. I tried to catch you, but you ran off and”—he pauses, then straightens, his brows pulling together—“I told him to pack it up and get off the ice. I let him cool off in the locker room awhile, but I pulled him into my office after practice and said ‘You will never speak to my daughter that way again. You will never make her feel small in my rink. So long as I am Coach, that ice is mine, and she belongs on it more than you do.’”
The words ring in my ears, my breaths coming out in shallow gulps, each one threatening to break me. My father watches me, waiting for some sort of response, but all I can do is try to process another piece of my life reforming in my mind.
He was there.
He cared.
He acted.
I swallow hard, lips parting, unsure what words are coming next. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you come after me?”
My father sighs, head shaking just slightly. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to talk to you. You were thirteen. You were already pulling away. And you were…so angry.” He pauses. “And I don’t blame you. I’d earned it. But it didn’t make it easier to know how to reach you.”
He walks to the window.
“Your mother was right about me. I spent too much time with hockey. Too many missed dinners and school plays and the thousand small things that add up to a childhood I wasn’t fully present for.”
“Dad—”
“Let me say this,” he says without turning.
“She was right to leave. But my failure wasn’t choosing hockey over you.
It was not knowing how to love you in a language you could understand.
Hockey was the only language I spoke. My father was the same.
He coached until he was seventy. And my mother waited for him.
For years, she waited. It killed me. And I swore I’d be different. I guess I was exactly the same.”
He turns. Not the coach. But Duncan Hart, my father. I feel like I’m seeing him for the first time in my life. He was a stranger, and we’ve just been introduced.
“When your mother said she needed to leave, I had a choice. I could fight. Hire lawyers. Force a custody war that would have torn you apart. Or I could let you go. Peacefully. And let her build what she needed to make you feel safe.”
“No,” I say, eyes closing, head shaking. That’s—that’s not right. “No, you chose hockey.” Seventeen years of pressure finding the cracks.
“I stayed with the job that paid your mother’s rent.
That paid child support every month. Paid for your college tuition.
Your health insurance. The car she drove.
” He pauses, the lines of his eyes red, a grimacing, watery smile.
“Everly, I didn’t choose hockey over you.
I didn’t—” His voice breaks, cracking under the weight of a lifetime of words unsaid.
“I used hockey to take care of you. The only way I could. From a distance. Because I thought the distance was the kindest thing.”
Silence.
“But I failed you,” he says, voice stripped to the studs.
“Not by choosing hockey. By not learning your language. By hiding behind provision and boundaries, telling myself I was doing what was right by staying away, when what you needed was for me to show up at your door and tell you the truth. That I read your books and they’re brilliant and I love you and I’m sorry.
” He pauses, a shuddering stop as the words catch in his throat.
“I never stopped choosing you,” he whispers as though it’s all he can manage.
“I just chose you in a language you couldn’t hear. ”
My eyes fall shut, sniffling as a tear breaks down my cheek. “Because you spoke provision,” I say. “And I spoke presence.”
Finally, I understand.
“Yes.” Seventeen years in one word. “And I’m sorry I didn’t learn your language sooner.”
He crosses the room, pulling me into his arms, and I bury my head in his chest. I’m suffocating on tears, trying to hold myself together—one breath, two—and then something inside me lets go, surrenders to the safety of my father’s arms. Suddenly, I’m eleven years old, crying behind that Zamboni—
And my dad finds me there.
We stay like that for a long time. Until I can’t cry anymore. Until my breath finds its pattern again, slow and steady, sleepy. Until I step back, exhausted, but just a little healed.
He smiles at me, a little healed too. “Would you stay for dinner? I’d like a little more time with you.”
I smile, soggy. “I’ve been given specific instructions to eat anything other than ice cream. So yeah…I could eat.”
He nods to the door. “Come on.”
I go to follow him and pause, my gaze catching on the framed lyrics. “‘All the vain things that charm me most…’” I say.
He stops, follows my gaze. “After all these years, it still stops me. It’s a good reminder.”
“Where did you get that?”
“Oh, that’s from Beckett’s dad. My best friend. When he died…well, I made him a promise. It had to do with Beckett.”
I knew that already, didn’t I?
He looks at the song. “Michael Benson was one of the best men I ever knew. He could have been big—really big. Got offers from Winnipeg and Chicago and New York, but he chose to stay here, playing for our little team, because his wife loved it here and he’d started this hockey team for kids at Sutton Arena and…
well, he said he didn’t need his name in lights.
Just light in his name. A man who called himself a Christian. ”
I wonder if Beckett knows that story.
Dad turns to me. “Do you know how the hymn ends?”
I shake my head.
“‘Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.’” He smiles as though that should tell me everything I need to know.
His eyes catch mine and he keeps going. “It’s a reminder that there is nothing in this life I can do to earn God’s love—that all those things that charm me most, that bolster my pride and put my ego in the forefront of my life, are meaningless compared to the love God has for us.
A love undeserved. Given selflessly with the knowledge it can never be repaid. ”
I look again, reading the verse over in my head.
“It’s a reminder that the things I was clinging to—the career, the identity, Coach Hart—those were the vain things. Easier than the hard thing.”
“And what was the hard thing?”
He smiles, lifting a hand to brush over my hair. “This. This was the harder thing. But the only thing that really matters.”