Chapter 13
Blake
Something about the way Lisa reacted last night didn’t sit right with me. The more time passed between that moment and now, the less I can convince myself I imagined it or exaggerated it in my head.
She said she was fine.
She even smiled when she said it. For most people, this would’ve been enough to drop the conversation and move on with the evening.
Still, I have spent most of my adult life around people who say they are fine when what they really mean is please don’t ask me anything else right now, and Lisa’s voice had carried that same careful softness.
It hadn’t been annoyance. It hadn’t been awkwardness. It hadn’t even been anger. It had been recognition followed by restraint, the kind that doesn’t come from surprise but from memory.
And the problem with that realization is that I know exactly who had caused it. James. Of course, it was James. It was always James.
I don’t sleep much that night. Not because the date itself was bad, in fact, the opposite was true, but because the last fifteen minutes of it kept replaying in my head. I replay it over and over in a way that makes it impossible to settle into anything resembling rest.
Dinner was easy in a way I didn’t expect.
The kind of dinner that feels easy, a feeling that usually takes months to build, rather than a single evening and two glasses of wine.
I walked her back toward the car, already thinking about how I was going to ask her out again without making it feel like pressure.
Then she saw him. Everything about her changed in the space of a heartbeat. Her shoulders had gone rigid. Her breathing had shortened. Her hands had curled in toward herself like she was trying to take up less space in the world. It wasn’t obvious unless you were looking directly at her. I was.
Practice starts way too early. It’s the time of day when the rink still smells faintly like fresh ice and cold metal when I walk in. The quiet before the team arrives stretches across the empty space like something fragile.
Jake skates past me while I am tying my laces. He slows enough to study my face with the kind of curiosity that usually means he has already decided what is wrong and just needs confirmation.
“You look like you’re planning something illegal,” he says casually, dropping onto the bench beside me.
“I’m thinking,” I reply, not looking up.
“That’s worse,” he answers immediately. “Thinking never ends well for you.”
I ignore him, but he leans back against the lockers anyway, like he has nowhere else to be.
Before he can say anything else, Coach steps onto the ice and claps once. The sharp sound echoes across the rink and ends the conversation before it can go anywhere.
By the time practice is over, the unease I had been trying to ignore has settled into something heavier. It turned into something that no longer feels like curiosity but more like responsibility.
Lisa told me James was “someone she used to know.” Technically, that wasn’t a lie, but I had to know what she was hiding.
After that conversation, there was only one thing left to do. I start looking.
Not because I want to invade her privacy. I look because I can’t ignore what I saw in her face the night before. I just know that if James Perth is involved in whatever happened in California, I have to take the situation seriously.
It doesn’t take long. Public athletes leave trails everywhere. Photos from charity events. Press coverage from team fundraisers. Tagged images from fan pages that documented every appearance like evidence. Lisa shows up in more than one of them. Standing beside him. Laughing beside him.
Close enough that no caption is necessary to explain the relationship. They hadn’t just known each other. They had been together. Long enough that people noticed. Long enough that speculation about an engagement had begun to appear in comment sections beneath event photos.
My jaw tightens as I scroll. That explains the recognition. It doesn’t explain her fear. So I keep looking. Eventually, I find something else. Not an article. Not a statement. Just a rumor thread buried deep in a forum I haven’t opened in years.
Perth’s girlfriend left suddenly. Something happened. No explanation from either side.
I stare at the screen for a long time before closing my laptop. I think about the way Lisa’s shoulders tightened when she saw him. The way she minimized the encounter with a single careful sentence, and how she still chose to stay with me the rest of the evening anyway.
Whatever had happened between her and James…
It isn’t finished yet. Not for him. Maybe not even for her. But one thing is suddenly very clear to me. He doesn’t get to decide how that story ends anymore.