Chapter 37
Present Day
After Chase storms out of my apartment, I can’t calm down. I put on my flannel pajamas and brush my teeth. But when I lie down on my bed, my heart still thumps with anxiety.
Chase wasn’t angry because I lost him a job. Chase was angry because he thinks I betrayed him to my mother.
Which I did—but only because I was trying to protect him.
My whole life caught fire, he said. That’s the part I still don’t understand.
I pick up my phone and consider calling my mother. But it’s twelve thirty, and she won’t answer anyway.
Then my gaze falls on my uncle’s nagging text. He lives and coaches in Vancouver now, where it’s not quite so late. So I touch his avatar and put my phone to my ear.
“Zoe,” he answers gruffly. “Hey. How’s it going in New York?”
The phrase big orange fireball comes to mind, but I don’t share it. “The Legends are a great organization.”
“Did they say anything yet about giving you a contract for next year?”
“No,” I admit. “But I live in hope.”
“Do you need money?” he asks. “You can’t possibly survive in New York on a temporary contract.”
“I didn’t call to ask for a loan. Jesus. I’m a grown adult.”
“Then why don’t you act like one? Your mom is getting new gray hairs every day worrying about you. Call her.”
I take a deep slow breath. “I’ll call her tomorrow,” I promise with some reluctance.
“If I can’t get a full-time job next year, then she won’t have to wonder anymore, because I’ll be right back under her roof.
” Like a grown adult who failed. Again. “How are you, by the way? Good team this year?” He coaches a minor league team these days.
“Good. Not great,” he says gruffly. “We’re on a three-day road trip.”
“Ooh, sorry.” Those bus trips can be brutal. “Look, I have a question for you. Remember Chase Merritt?”
There’s a silence on the line. “Kind of. Why?”
“Kind of? I assumed you wouldn’t forget one of the most successful players you ever coached.”
“Zoe, he wasn’t my player for very long.”
“And why is that?” I ask, getting to the real reason for my call. “I noticed that his stats from his second year with you look strange. Like maybe he didn’t play the whole season or something. Was he injured?”
“Uh…” He chuckles uncomfortably. “I don’t recall an injury. We just didn’t get on very well. That I remember. He wasn’t putting in the effort.”
Chills rise up my skin as I try and fail to imagine Chase Merritt not putting in the effort for his college coach. “What didn’t he do, exactly?”
He sighs. “Who knows. It was a long time ago. And he left before the end of the season.”
That’s the weirdest part of all. And nobody’s memory is that bad. Every coach remembers the ones who made it big. “Did he lose his place on the team? Or lose his scholarship?” Because if he wasn’t injured, those are the only two possibilities that make sense. “Good players don’t just quit.”
“Sure they do,” my uncle grunts. “Look, Zoe, I gotta go. I’m on a bus with twenty-three hockey players. You sure you don’t need money?”
“No, I don’t.” Not from you. “Good luck with your game tomorrow.” We sign off, and I set the phone down again and study the darkened ceiling of my living room.
When I lost Chase, I was eighteen years old. He was nineteen. But to me, he seemed much more mature and worldly than I was. It never occurred to me that his life could be completely derailed by me or my family.
I’m an idiot.
My phone vibrates with a text, and I grab it off the mattress, hoping to hear from Chase.
But instead, I find a message from Tremaine.
If you’re up, there’s something I need you to see. Sound on.
Come quickly, he adds a moment later.
And after I watch the video, I do.
Ten minutes later I arrive, panting, at Chase’s fancy apartment building. As the doors glide open and I see the same smartly dressed woman behind the concierge desk, I regret my wardrobe choices.
All I did before leaving the house was throw on a parka and shoes. Underneath, I’m still dressed in green flannel with giant pink gardenias.
Smooth, says the panel of judges in my head.
“Zoe from the video,” she says without batting an eye. “I heard Mr. Tremaine is expecting you upstairs.”
“Well, sort of,” I say, my face coloring. She’s going to assume I’m sleeping with multiple Legends.
“I heard you’re here to stage an intervention,” she says, pressing a button that causes the elevator to slide open. “The neighbors below Chase’s place keep calling to complain about the depressing music. Godspeed.”
“Um, thank you,” I say. I dart into the elevator with a quick salute.
The car begins rising smoothly, and I wonder whether visiting Chase is the right thing to do when he literally ran from my apartment an hour ago. I’ve already inflicted a lifetime’s worth of difficulties on the guy. This might only annoy him.
But Tremaine showed me a video of Chase seated outside in the cold on his terrace, listening to “Hallelujah” on repeat.
The Jeff Buckley version. It’s the most depressing song in the world, right after Wicked Game, Tremaine texted.
He’s really down, and I can tell you two have some unresolved issues.
What if I can’t solve them? I asked on my way out the door.
Just try. We have to beat Montreal tomorrow night. The team needs you.
And then: I think you can fix more than his pelvis. A moment went by, and then Tremaine added: I meant that in a completely non-creepy way.
Noted, I replied just before I began to jog.
When the elevator doors part, I find Tremaine pacing on the landing of The Lair. “There you are!” he says. “It’s bad. I tried talking to him, but he threw me out.”
Yikes. “I owe him an apology, but what if he’s not in the mood to hear it?”
He’s already unlocking Chase’s apartment door. “Then you will have tried, Zoe. We need the win tomorrow night. Not to mention that the downstairs neighbors are super sick of this song. It’s after midnight.”
“Fine. But when this goes bad, it’s on you.”
He grins and holds the door open, and I take a deep breath and step inside. “Chase? It’s Zoe!” I call out. It’s only polite to announce yourself when you’re breaking and entering.
But he doesn’t answer. So I walk all the way into his living room.
And I spot him through the glass—exactly where Tremaine’s video showed him—seated on one of those outdoor couches that only fancy hotels and rich people have.
He’s got a comforter spread over his lap and a dire expression on his face as he studies the twinkling lights over the river and into New Jersey.
I can hear Jeff Buckley crooning from here.
I walk over to the sliding glass door and open it.
Somehow he hears this over the music. “Tremaine, just leave me alone. Or else I’ll dig up that recording of the time you thought you were alone in the locker room, and sang ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ at the top of your lungs in the shower. And I’ll share it with the whole team.”
“At some point I’m going to need to hear that.”
His head jerks at the sound of my voice. “How did you get here? Were you summoned?”
“Yeah.” It’s not a warm welcome, but I slide the door shut behind me and approach him anyway. He taps his phone, and Jeff Buckley stops singing mid-phrase.
Besides the sofa, there’s one other piece of furniture on this balcony, and it’s a little metal chair. So the moment I sit down on it, my ass practically freezes to the iron. “Look, I know you don’t want me here, and I’ll get out of your way in a second. But I owe you an apology. A big one.”
He looks away. “Nah. You don’t.”
“Yes, I do. And not for stupid mistakes—like wanting to break all the rules with you when I was eighteen, or for interfering with a fan in a bar. And not for taking this job, either. I did all those things out of love.”
He glances quickly at me but then away again.
“But you were right about me and my family. I never held my ground. And I never asked the tough questions. If I’d had a backbone, then I could have loved you out in the open.
I wouldn’t have made you lie and get fired and maybe lose your place on my uncle’s team.
I still don’t really know what happened there. ”
He tips his head back and looks up at the sky. “It’s okay, Zoe.”
“No, it isn’t.” My voice chokes up, catching me by surprise.
“I broke our agreement, just like you said. I told myself I was trying to save you, but it was more complicated than that. I’ve spent my whole life trying to win her approval.
I could have told my mom to get lost when she caught us eating ice cream on the roof.
We could have just asked for a night off together. ”
“Or here’s an idea,” he says, suddenly meeting my gaze. “What if your mother looked at two kids playing Battleship on a roof and thought, How nice for my daughter. She has someone who makes her laugh. We weren’t exactly doing heroin up there, Zoe.”
The idea stops me cold because it’s such a wild departure from the way things work in my life. But it shouldn’t be.
“Look,” he says. “I feel like an ass for running out on you tonight. But I’ve been at war with myself since the moment you showed your face in New York.”
“Why?”
“Because you stirred up some things for me. I’ve spent years clinging tightly to my righteous anger, but maybe some of it was bullshit.”
“My family was horrible to you,” I insist. “My mother treated you like a criminal. And my uncle… I don’t know exactly what he did, but it must have been bad. And I’ve never stood up to them. For either of us.”
“That’s all true,” he says. “But intentions matter. And here you come rolling into town, determined to fix everything. You fixed my skating.”
“I fixed your pelvis.”
He grins. “That will never not be funny. You also started a bar fight in my honor.”
“It was a bar shove, not a fight. I will die on this hill.”