Chapter 6
NEW ROUTE
GRANT
Iwoke up at five-thirty with my heart already racing, that low-grade anxiety that had become my baseline over the past three years.
I lay there for a minute, staring at the ceiling of my mostly empty bedroom, and tried to remember the last time I'd woken up calm. The answer came back the same way it always did—a blank wall where a memory should've been.
The apartment was quiet except for the distant sound of traffic and the hum of the heating system struggling to keep up with October in Toronto. My bedroom had a bed, a nightstand, and nothing else. No pictures on the walls. No personal touches. Just the bare minimum required to sleep.
I rolled out of bed and pulled on running clothes because movement was better than sitting with my own thoughts. The apartment was cold, air seeping through windows I hadn't bothered to weatherproof yet. Toronto in the fall was brutal—damp cold that got into your bones and stayed there.
I laced up my shoes and told myself this was about fitness.
Cardio. Keeping my body functional so I could stand on my feet for three-hour practices and not feel like I was dying.
It was actually about burning off the anxiety before it ate me alive, but I'd been lying to myself about that particular distinction for long enough that it barely registered anymore.
I stepped outside and immediately regretted not checking the temperature first. But I started running anyway, heading north out of habit, then realizing two blocks in that I had no idea where I was going.
I'd moved into this neighborhood and still hadn't figured out the geography. Streets that looked identical. Intersections that looped back on themselves. I'd been too busy learning the arena, studying the roster, building practice plans to actually learn where I lived.
I should've pulled out my phone and used a map. But that felt like admitting defeat, and I was too stubborn for that. So I kept running, turning at random, telling myself I'd figure it out eventually.
The neighborhood was quiet at this hour. A few other runners. Dog walkers. The occasional car heading to an early shift. No one cared who I was or what I did for a living. No one recognized me. I was just another guy in worn-out running shoes trying to outrun his own head.
It felt good. Better than good.
My lungs burned after the first mile, my legs finding their rhythm, and I focused on the physical sensation instead of the mental noise. One foot in front of the other. Breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth. The simple mechanics of forward motion.
I ran past coffee shops just opening, their windows glowing warm in the pre-dawn light. Past a park with empty swings swaying in the wind. Past houses where families were probably still asleep, warm and safe and unburdened by the constant worry that they'd fuck up so badly they'd lose everything.
Must be nice.
I ran for maybe twenty minutes before I smelled it—baking bread, that specific, unmistakable scent that meant a bakery was nearby and already working.
I followed my nose like a bloodhound and found the place tucked between a laundromat and a bike shop. The sign said “Paulo's” in faded letters, and through the window I could see racks of pastries cooling on wire shelves.
I stopped.
I shouldn't. I had meal prep at home. Protein and vegetables portioned out in containers, the disciplined approach to nutrition I'd maintained since my playing days. But I was standing outside a bakery at six in the morning, sweaty and tired and alone, and the world wasn't ending, so I went inside.
The warmth hit me first—air thick with the smell of sugar and butter and yeast. A woman behind the counter looked up and smiled, unbothered by the sweaty guy who'd just walked in.
“Morning,” she said, Portuguese accent, warm and genuine. “What can I get you?”
“What's good?”
“Everything. But the cinnamon rolls just came out.”
“I'll take one. And a coffee.”
She boxed up the roll and poured coffee into a paper cup, and the whole transaction felt absurdly normal. No one asking for autographs. No one recognizing me from that article three years ago. Just a woman selling baked goods to a customer.
I paid with cash and took my breakfast to a bench outside.
The cinnamon roll was still warm, probably a thousand calories of sugar and butter that my nutritionist would've murdered me for. I ate it anyway, sitting on a cold bench in running clothes, watching the city wake up around me.
It was perfect.
Dad bod solidarity, I thought, and almost laughed at myself.
I'd spent my twenties and thirties obsessed with being lean and fast and game-ready.
Now I was forty-one with a soft middle and knees that ached when it rained, and honestly I didn't hate it.
This body had carried me through a decade of professional hockey and another decade of coaching.
It had earned the right to eat a fucking cinnamon roll on a Friday morning.
I finished eating and started running again, slower this time, taking actual notice of where I was. The neighborhood had a rhythm—quieter than downtown, more residential, the kind of place where people actually knew their neighbors. I liked it.
I was trying to figure out which street would take me back when something hit me at approximately knee height and nearly took me off my feet.
I stumbled, caught myself, and looked down.
A golden retriever was attempting to climb my entire body, all wagging tail and scrambling paws and an expression of absolute deranged joy, like I was the specific human it had been searching for its entire life and had finally, miraculously, located on this particular sidewalk on this particular Tuesday morning.
“Hey—” I grabbed the trailing leash before it could get further tangled around my legs. “Hey. Down. Sit.”
The dog sat immediately.
“Sorry, sorry—” A voice from behind me, breathing hard, the specific cadence of someone who’d been running faster than they’d planned to. “She just—she saw you, and I lost the leash, and she’s been doing this all morning. She has absolutely zero—”
The voice stopped.
Hartley stood on the sidewalk six feet away, hands on his knees as he caught his breath.
He was wearing sweatpants that were doing nothing to help my morning, and a hoodie that had been washed enough times to go soft and shapeless in a way that somehow made things worse instead of better.
His hair was doing something it never did at the rink—loose, slightly disheveled, the kind of effortless that looked unfair.
“Coach,” he said.
“Hartley,” I said.
We looked at each other.
The dog looked between us with the attentive interest of someone following a tennis match.
“This is yours?” I said, nodding at the dog.
“My sister's.” He straightened up, taking the leash back from me with a hand that brushed mine for approximately half a second in the exchange, which I noted and immediately filed under irrelevant, moving on.
“Her doggy daycare's under renovation. She had a double shift this morning and apparently I'm the only person in Leah's life who doesn't have a real job.”
“You have a real job.”
“I play hockey. According to Leah, that's a hobby that pays well.” He looked down at the dog, who was now sitting on my foot. “Her name's Biscuit.”
“Of course it is.” I looked down at Biscuit, who looked back up at me with complete adoration. “She always like this?”
“She did the same thing to a fire hydrant twenty minutes ago. I don't think it's personal.” He paused. “Actually, she sat for you. She doesn't usually sit for anyone. She doesn't even sit for Leah.”
“I told her to sit.”
“And she just—” He gestured at the dog. “Biscuit. Sit.”
Biscuit looked at him with the patient expression of a creature who understood perfectly well what was being asked and had elected not to do it.
“She respects authority,” I said.
Hartley stared at his sister's dog for a moment with an expression that suggested this was a personal affront. “That's genuinely offensive.”
“Take it up with the dog.”
“I'm taking it up with you. What are you doing here?”
“I run every morning. This is me trying a new route.” I nodded at the street behind him. “What are you doing on it?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. “Leah lives on Palmerston. I'm staying at her place while she's at work because Biscuit apparently can't be left alone for more than four hours without staging a protest that involves the couch cushions.”
I looked at the dog. The dog wagged.
“How's the couch?” I asked.
“One cushion down. Leah's going to kill me.”
The thing about being outside the rink was that it was harder to maintain the appropriate distance. At the rink I had the whistle. I had the practice plan. I had a hundred small mechanisms for keeping the necessary space in place.
But with Hartley in soft sweatpants holding a golden retriever's leash, I apparently had considerably fewer mechanisms.
I looked at the space slightly to the left of his shoulder, which was a location that didn't have sweatpants in it, and said, “You take her out yet this morning?”
Hartley blinked. “What?”
“The dog. Did you take her for a proper run?”
“Oh.” He looked down at Biscuit. “We went around the block twice but she kept stopping to smell everything. It took forty minutes.”
“Dogs need distance, not just time.” I glanced at Biscuit, who was now sitting on both my feet. “She's got energy she hasn't burned. That's why she's climbing strangers.”
“She climbs everyone. That's just her personality.”
“She sat for a stranger on command. That's training. She just needs the run to match it.” I looked back at him, which was a mistake I immediately recognized and continued to make anyway because apparently my self-preservation instincts had also taken the morning off.
He had a smear of what looked like peanut butter on his left sleeve and I had no idea what to do with that information. “Where are you headed?”