37. Tyler
TYLER
It’s been a week since Jessica showed up, and I'm drowning.
Not in a visible way. On the surface, I'm functional, showing up to practice, coming home, caring for Harper, holding Nora at night, and telling her it's going to be okay. I'm saying all the right things, going through all the right motions.
But underneath, somewhere no one can see, I'm coming apart.
It’s Friday night, and Harper's been down since seven-thirty. Nora has her lamp on and her book open, asleep over it the way she does sometimes, exhausted from the week of preparation and worry and pretending not to worry. I covered her with a blanket around ten and came upstairs to my room.
I can't sleep.
What if the judge gives Jessica shared custody?
What if she gets weekends? What if Harper has to go to a woman who showed up high on my doorstep, and I have to pretend that's okay?
What if they give her Harper entirely?
The thought is physical. It knocks the air clean out of me, like taking a hit into the boards, except there's no ice to skate it off on, no whistle to blow, just me and the ceiling and the specific terror of a thought I can't finish.
I can do the math on my own failure. I've done it a hundred times.
My parents, who found it easier to love me from a distance.
Emma, whom I hurt without meaning to, who has more grace than I deserve.
Chase, who went down on the ice because of me.
Jessica, whom I spent one night with and never followed up on, who got pregnant with our daughter and never told me.
All of it adds up to a pattern that looks like this: Tyler West ruins people.
And now Harper.
What if I ruin this, too?
What if a judge looks at my life, a professional hockey player, rarely home, living with the woman he fell in love with, who started as his nanny, and decides that's not a stable home? What if the instability is me? What if I'm the problem? What if the best thing for Harper is—
The thought cuts off there because I can't finish it.
I get up. I can't stay in that room with those thoughts.
Downstairs is dark except for the glow of the new security camera monitor I installed. I've been checking it compulsively, waiting for Jessica's car to appear on the feed, braced for her to come back.
I sit on the couch and put my head in my hands.
I'm going to lose her.
The certainty of it settles over me like something physical, and I can't breathe past it. Can't find the logical counter-argument I've been constructing all week. Can't hear Ms. Chen's voice saying sixty-forty or Nora's voice saying we have the evidence, and months of proof.
I can only hear the old voice, the one that sounds like too many years of being the problem, saying, you always ruin what you love.
"Ty?"
Nora's voice in the doorway. I look up.
She's in the oversized t-shirt she wears to sleep, her hair loose. She takes one look at me, and she knows. She always knows.
She crosses the room and drops to her knees in front of me.
"What's happening?"
I try to say nothing. I try to say I'm fine. The words don't come.
What comes out instead is, "I'm going to lose her."
And then everything that's been building breaks loose, and I tell her everything. The truth beneath the custody fear. The pattern. The year in Ridgeport, eating protein bars in parking lots, believing I deserved to be invisible because that's what you get when you're a fuck-up.
And then, finally, the thing under all of it.
"There was a dinner," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Years back in Hartford with Chase and Emma. A bunch of us went out. Me, them, Donny, Jackson, and Maya.”
She doesn't say anything.
"Maya had left her job—left Pinewood entirely—and nobody knew why.
She'd lost weight and shown up in Hartford out of nowhere and wouldn't say what had happened, and I…
I decided I was going to be the one who got it out of her.
I pushed her at the table, and then I cornered her outside the restaurant after.
She kept telling me to stop, telling me to back off, and I kept pushing because in my head I was trying to help. "
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
"And then I grabbed her arm. To stop her from walking away.
And she… God, Nora, she went somewhere else.
Her face. I'll never not see her face. Whatever had happened to her, she was right back inside it, and I'd put her there, standing on a sidewalk in front of my friends.
Jackson saw it before I did. He pulled me off her and dropped me with one punch, and I deserved it.
I deserved worse than that, and I knew it, and yet I still didn't go to her.
I just sat on the concrete bleeding and told myself it wasn't that bad. "
My hands won't stay still.
"She wouldn't speak to me after that. Wouldn't be in the same room.
Jackson made it clear in about six different ways that I was done.
And I was angry about it. Can you believe that?
I was angry that he wouldn't forgive me for what I'd done to her.
I told myself it was an overreaction. I told myself I hadn't meant it.
And I carried that anger around with me for months. "
Nora's hand finds my knee and stays there.
"Game one of the Stanley Cup Final. Pinewood Bears against the Ridgeport Wolves. We're up by one with two minutes to go, and they pull their goalie. The play stops for an icing call, and I look across the ice, and there he is, just jumped on for the faceoff. Thirty feet away with his back to me."
I make myself say it.
"I decided right there and then that I wasn't going to take the puck, I wasn't going to play the shift, I was going to put him through the boards, for what he'd done to me at that restaurant.
For all of it. The puck dropped, and I skated full speed, head down, and I hit him from behind while he had his back turned.
It was a dirty hit. The kind that ends careers.
He went down and didn't get up, and I lined up to hit him again while he was lying there. "
I'm shaking.
"Chase wasn't even supposed to be near it…
he was nowhere near that play. But he saw what I was doing, and he threw himself between Jackson and me.
He shoved me in the chest with both hands and called me a coward.
I dropped my gloves, and so did he, and we fought.
On the ice. In Game One of the Stanley Cup Final, with Jackson lying unconscious six feet away from us.
We dropped gloves like a couple of fucking children. "
She's not moving. I'm not looking at her. I'm staring at the rug.
"Chase's helmet came off in the scrum. It just came off. The Wolves enforcer was skating in to break it up, to get Chase off me, nothing more than that. But he was coming in hot, and he didn't see that Chase's helmet was gone, and Chase had his back to him too, and he couldn't stop in time."
I close my eyes.
"He hit Chase clean, and he went sideways, and his head—his unprotected head—came down on the ice. I heard it. I heard it over a sold-out arena. Emma heard it from the stands. Chase didn't get up. They got him off on a stretcher. He was in a coma, Nora. For weeks."
I scrub a hand over my face.
"He woke up. He came back. He's whole. He's Chase. And Jackson recovered, too, as it wasn’t actually that bad. But both of them came back from what I did, and the worst part… the part I can't put down is that they forgave me, which is generous in a way I cannot comprehend.”
I finally look at her.
"And every single one of them looking me in the face and telling me they were okay was worse than if they'd never spoken to me again, because they were better people than me, and I didn't know how to live in a place where everyone was being kind to me about something I'd done.
So I asked to be traded, and I came here, and I told myself if I just kept moving, eventually I'd outrun it. "
The room is very quiet.
"And now I'm here," I say, my voice wrecked, "this person who ruins things.
And I have a daughter who deserves better, and you, and I'm so scared that I'm going to lose both of you the same way I've lost everything because I don't—" I stop.
"I don't know how to not be the thing that happens to people. "
I'm crying. Not the quiet kind. The kind I've been holding back for months, maybe years.
Nora's hands are on my face.
"Listen to me," she says. Fiercely. Completely certain. "You are not going to lose us. Either of us."
"You don't know—"
"I know I'm here. I know I love you. I know I love Harper. And I know I'm not going anywhere." Her thumbs wipe at my tears, and they keep coming. "Tyler. Look at me."
I meet her eyes.
"You're not the thing that happens to people," she says.
"You're a man who, with no warning, got dropped into fatherhood with zero preparation.
Who learned every single day because he refused to give up on his daughter.
You're the man who shows up. Who takes time off practice for doctor's appointments and learns to read every cry, knows which position she likes when she's colicky, and narrates hockey statistics to a baby for twenty minutes because he wants to share the thing he loves with her. "
My throat is too tight to reply.
“The things you did… They were real. But Tyler. You've been serving a sentence you gave yourself, and I need you to hear me when I tell you that everyone forgave you. I know."
"How do you—"
"I heard you. On Thanksgiving night, I was awake on the sleeping bags, and the kitchen wall is thin, and I heard most of what Emma said to you. About the man she knows. About forgiving yourself."
I stare at her.
"You knew. The whole time."
"I knew." Her thumb keeps wiping at my face.
"I knew the shape of it. I didn't know the full details.
I didn't tell you because you weren't ready to tell me, and that wasn't my decision to make.
But I've known since then. And nothing in what she said made me love you less. If anything, it made me love you more."
I don't know what to do with that. I just look at her.
"Harper doesn't see someone who ruins things," she says. "She sees her dad. The person who shows up. The person who makes her feel safe. That's who you are to her, and that's what a judge is going to see too."
I pull her into my arms, face pressed against her shoulder, and she holds me while I fall apart.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't pull away. She just holds me.
When the worst of it passes, I'm depleted and wrung out and lighter than I've felt in months.
"I'm sorry," I manage. "I shouldn't have—"
"Don't apologize." She pulls back enough to look at me. "You catch me when I fall apart. This is me catching you. That's how we work."
My phone buzzes on the coffee table. I reach for it.
There’s an email from Ms. Chen.
Court Date Set, March 8th Emergency Custody Hearing.
Ten days.
"What is it?" Nora asks.
"Court date. March eighth."
She absorbs this for a moment. "Ten days. Good. That's enough time to prepare. Ms. Chen will tell us exactly what we need, and we'll do all of it." She takes my face in both hands. "We can do this, Tyler. All of it. Together."
I kiss her because I need to. Because she's here and solid. She knows the worst of me, and she's still here.
"Together," I agree.
We end up on the couch, Nora lying with her head on my chest, both of us finally still.
Around two in the morning, she asks, "When we win—not if, when—what's the first thing you want to do?"
"Take you both somewhere," I say. "Somewhere with a beach. Let Harper feel sand for the first time, and watch her try to eat it, which she definitely will. Just be a family without any of this hanging over us."
"That sounds perfect."
"And Red? After we win, I'm telling everyone. No more hiding. No more pretending you're just the nanny."
She tilts her head up and kisses me, soft and full of everything we're waiting to say out loud.
In ten days, we will walk into court to fight for Harper.
And whatever happens, we're doing it together.
That has to be enough.
It is.