Chapter 15
THEO
Coming back to San Jose after being with his mom for a week was jarring. He’d just had a chunk of time hanging out and hiking with his mom, eating a bunch of comfort food, and doing the Portland things she’d fallen in love with since the last time he had visited.
Theo’s plane had gotten in the night before, but he’d flopped face-first into his bed. Then he’d gotten up, gone to practice, and now he had to pack a bag to go on a roadie, and he couldn’t find enough dress shirts.
He was briefly envious of the guys whose wives did all this shit for them. He heard the married boys talking about how their wives did their shopping. Any of the nicely dressed guys had these personal stylists who also did their laundry.
He scraped through his closet and found enough shirts, got settled with a suit that matched, and then had to find ties. He hated the dress code. Yes, sometimes it resulted in him looking hot and feeling good, but mostly it was a headache.
He remembered a purple paisley tie that his mom got him for Christmas a couple years ago that would go with two of his shirts, but it wasn’t on his tie hanger.
Theo could admit that he wasn’t the most organized person in the world, and he had several unlabeled boxes in his closet that he had been moving around with him his entire career. Maybe it was in one of them.
He pulled two down, and it was easy to see it wasn’t in the first one. All that was in there were a couple of photos in frames, some keepsakes, an old alarm clock. The kinds of things that lived on dressers and nightstands that never made it out of the box once they were put away. No tie.
The second box had a stack of dress pants he had grown out of (thank you, hockey ass), and a shoebox. He recognized the shoebox. It was old, and he’d started it in junior to hold all of his keepsakes as he moved around with his mom from apartment to apartment.
He flipped the top up to reveal a jumble of shit.
His tie was nowhere to be found, but he felt the instant pull back into the past. The Flint Jaguars had been some of the happiest years of his life, even after Rowan left.
He set records; he got the C. In his final season, they won the Memorial Cup.
He shifted through tournament programs, medals, and NHL tickets for games he was able to squeeze in.
Proof that he had lived through those years.
And at the bottom, there was an envelope with his name on it, written in Rowan’s spiny, terrible handwriting.
He would know it anywhere. He had forgotten about this letter, but now that he had it in his hands, the memory came back in a rush.
Rowan had given it to him on draft day, when they had both been shaky with nerves.
Everyone already knew Rowan was going to Texas, but while Theo was projected to go top six, he could have ended up anywhere.
He knew it was a bad idea to open this envelope, but Theo wasn’t known for his sterling decisions. He turned the envelope over and untucked the flap. It was just a couple pages of printer paper, Rowan’s shitty handwriting sloping up as he wrote.
A lot of the letter was just rehashing the good times they had playing hockey together. At the end, though, his words go from being sentimental to saccharine.
T, you have to understand that you’re my favorite hockey player. Whatever happens with the draft tonight, I believe in you. I am so excited to watch you explode in stardom. I’m excited for people to finally understand how great Theo Lane is. You deserve it. You deserve your own spotlight.
And remember that no matter what, I love you forever forever.
No matter what. They didn’t say the L-word all that often, especially in serious situations, and the magnitude of that statement had hit Theo hard.
Even in that moment, he knew it for what it was. A goodbye letter. They both knew big change was coming. Theo didn’t want to face it head-on. Rowan didn’t have a choice.
There were photos tucked into the envelope, too. Three photos of the two of them together. All photos that Rowan had taken, back when he didn’t leave the house without a two-pound camera on his shoulder.
There was one in particular where Rowan was sitting in Theo’s lap on a bench by a neighborhood hockey rink in Calgary, when Theo had visited him over winter break when they had ten days off.
Theo had been home for long enough to celebrate Christmas with his mom, but the two of them decided they missed each other too much to have ten full days apart.
In the photo, Rowan’s nose and cheeks are red.
He’s wearing Theo’s winter hat, and Rowan had captured the photo right at the moment Theo had decided to attack his cheek with kisses.
It was an unbearably sweet photo. It made his heart ache in a way that hovered between being so grateful to have such a physical memory of that moment, and also wishing it had never happened.
“ It’s better to have loved than lost ,” his ass.