Chapter 19
nineteen
ROWAN
Luca’s idea of a dinner table is three tables shoved end to end, a grimy drop cloth over the seams, and a handful of candles jammed into empty beer bottles that are now burning crooked in their own wax.
But it works.
Every chair around the table is full; there’s music playing from somebody’s phone, and the conversation is in full swing. As I sit back and soak it all in, I realize this is Ironwood House at full power, when the team closes around itself like a hug and it’s just us.
The food is half-homemade, half-salvaged: Luca’s pasta, the only thing he can cook without anyone holding it against him, plus garlic bread from June’s, a salad Niko assembled, and a tray of frozen mini apple pies that Luca swore he could handle.
Sloane is next to me, her hand on my thigh under the table, thumb tracing slow circles. We’re out, and people are getting more comfortable with the idea, because when we showed up tonight, Luca made a great show of us being seated together.
And I’m getting more comfortable with the idea, too.
It’s been four days since the kitchen, since I told Sloane the thing I’ve never known how to say cleanly — that without the steadying and the fixing I don’t know what’s underneath — and she didn’t leave.
I keep waiting for the cost of having said it out loud.
But, so far, it’s only made things easier.
Practice has gone smoother, my interactions with the guys have been calmer, and I’ve even managed to hold the line on my old man badgering me to meet this scout or that scout in any available moment of the day.
Last night, Coach even said, “Good week, Hale,” and then told me why Gavin left — not because he couldn’t do the job, but because he woke up one morning knowing he’d spent his whole life inside a plan somebody picked for him when he was twelve, and he was done.
I nodded like I understood, but I don’t.
How could anyone not want this? The guys? The dream of the NHL?
But most of all, I’ve stopped sweating about Mason.
At the far end of the table, he’s telling a story about a Pi Sigma formal I’ve heard before, but this time there are new details: a stolen portrait, a campus security golf cart commandeered at two a.m., and a girl named Brenda.
He’s been good tonight — warm, easy, present — in a way that makes it hard to remember why I was braced for him in the first place. The toga party’s old news now. Even Sloane keeps it civil with him for the team’s sake, and the guys have folded him back in.
I shift my focus down to the middle of the long table, where Ivy is in her element, needling Seb about something like usual while others get pulled into her orbit whether they like it or not.
Seb grins into his beer, which is as rare as spotting a shooting star. While I’m not following the bit, I am watching the two of them, and suddenly the text I saw on Seb’s phone makes more sense.
They need watching, those two, whether or not Seb realizes what Ivy is up to.
A few minutes later, Ivy catches Sloane’s eye and makes a face, bottom lip out, brows scrunched, so specific it has to be a reference to something between them I’ll never be part of. Sloane cracks up, fast and unguarded, and it’s a sound I love every time I hear it.
Under the table, Sloane’s grip tightens. When I glance at her, she’s still looking at Ivy, still smiling, but her weight shifts toward me. It’s been like this all night: her as part of my world, not hiding herself, just comfortable in her own skin.
Sloane tips her head toward the wreckage of Luca’s pasta. “Be honest. Score from 1–10?”
I laugh. “Different scale entirely.”
“That bad?”
“That good.” I think about how to put it. “At my parents’ table, the food’s flawless and the whole thing is a performance. Here, half of it is burned and nobody cares.”
“I had three pieces of that garlic bread.” She grins. “Turns out not giving a fuck what people think is way tastier.”
“I saw. I admired it.”
Under the table her foot hooks around my ankle. “Your mother would hate me,” she says.
“My mother would be terrified of you, the real you,” I say. “It’s one of your best qualities.”
“One of?”
“I’m keeping the list to myself. You’ll get complacent.”
She steals the last bite of pasta off my plate instead, like it’s half hers now. Maybe it is, because for the last few weeks — and especially since that night in the kitchen — she’s been the easiest breath I take all day.
A buzzing sound travels down the table. When I look, Seb’s phone is lit up, and he picks it up to see who’s calling. I know it can’t be Ivy this time, and yet he still makes a strange face before he silences the phone and puts it face down.
The night goes on. Sloane is loud and laughing and entirely herself. She’s here, full volume, one of the group, and I’m not having to steady anything. I don’t know what to do with that.
It’s just… nice.
The noise ebbs and flows — Luca mentions his family visiting this weekend — and the apple pies arrive looking like evidence from an arson investigation: charred on one side, pale on the other.
“They’re rustic,” Luca announces.
“Destroyed,” Theo says.
“That one’s still smoking, Luca,” Ivy says, pointing.
“Health code’s just a suggestion,” I say.
He puts the tray down and we eat. When the desserts are done, the playlist goes softer, and I step out onto the back porch for air, but Seb is already there, phone pressed to his ear, back to me, shoulders hunched.
“I know,” he’s saying, low. “Just — think about it, Mom. Please.”
I try to walk back inside without him noticing, because I’ve stumbled onto a private moment, but he turns and sees me. The look in his eyes is the one he gives an opponent on the ice before he buries them into the boards, but then he blinks and it’s gone.
He pockets the phone. “Just my mom.”
“Cool.” I nod and give him a second to say more, but he doesn’t.
I’ll find him later, and I’ll ask if he’s okay, and he’ll say nothing, and I’ll wait, and eventually he’ll tell me. It’s what I do, but it’s also what he does. So we walk back inside together, the warmth and noise hitting us all over again.
By now, Luca is holding court at the cleared end of the table, retelling a story from one of last year’s away trips with fresh embellishments, pulling Niko into the telling so he doesn’t drift away.
He makes it look careless, but his eyes sweep the room as he tells the story, refilling glasses and cracking a smile at those who are quiet. It’s like his superpower: every time he notices someone’s mood dropping, he zeroes in on them until they’re right back in and smiling.
And he’s just as important to the group as I am.
Just different.
“So,” Luca says, as if he’s reading my mind. “Niko.”
“Luca,” Niko says.
“The girl at Maple he reads it and puts it back down, screen-down, his expression carefully blank.
Sloane asks Mason for the last of the garlic bread — cold now, gone hard at the edges. He hands it to her, easy enough, but his eyes follow her. I tense a little, but a second later, he’s already grinning at something Theo said.
He’s been the Mason I remember from sophomore year all night, and maybe I’ve been carrying him as a problem when he’s just been a teammate having a couple of dumb months. I let it go, and my shoulders drop.
The knot I’ve been carrying since he got here — gone.
And it’s good, just breathing.
After dinner, people start drifting. Theo and Ivy migrate to the living room couch, still at it, their voices carrying through the wall. Mason folds himself into the armchair by the window with a fresh beer.
Seb checks his phone one more time, then pockets it and carries a stack of plates toward the kitchen without a word. I clock it — the set of his jaw, his refusal to look back — and as he goes, I catch Ivy’s eyes following him out.
Behind us, the night winds down, and Sloane leans into my side.
“You okay?” she says, quieter.
“Yeah.”
She studies my face. “You’re being quiet.”
“Happy’s quiet for me, apparently.”
Her mouth pulls up on one side before the rest of it commits. She tucks herself under my arm, and around us the room keeps going. She fits into the space between my jaw and my collarbone, and her hand finds mine in my lap and laces our fingers.
“I like your friends,” she says.
“They like you.”
“Ivy likes me.”
“Ivy loves you. There’s a difference.”
She laughs.
I hold still — nothing to straighten, nothing to fix — just this.
Across the room, Mason tips his beer back. When Sloane laughs at something Theo says, his eyes find her and stay half a beat past casual. A month ago I’d have filed that, logged it, added it to the list of things I watch. Tonight I let that go too, because tonight everything is finally easy.