25. Buzz
BUZZ
NOW
Lucy stood in my living room at one in the morning, looking out at the lake like I had accidentally opened the door to a future I had not known I was still stupid enough to want.
She had only stepped past the threshold, boots quiet on the dark wood floor, coat unbuttoned, Dottie’s leash still looped around one hand.
Her hair had come loose from whatever professional arrangement had survived most of her day at the arena, curls slipping around her face and catching faintly in the low light from the kitchen.
Her glasses sat a little lower on her nose than usual.
Her shoulders were tired. Her mouth was soft with the kind of quiet that meant she was taking in more than she intended to give back.
Behind her, through the black-framed wall of glass, the lake stretched dark and frozen beneath a thin cover of snow. No moon showed. Just the far-off shape of the opposite shore, the pale smear of ice, and my own reflection layered behind hers.
Her car sat in the driveway behind my truck, visible through the side window if I turned my head. She had parked with room to leave. Of course she had. Lucy Thomas did not walk into any situation without knowing where the exits were.
But she had walked in.
That was the part my body could not seem to process.
She had followed my taillights down the quiet road out of Northbend, past closed storefronts and sleeping houses and snowbanks cut hard by plows, all the way to this place I rarely let people see without noise around it.
Summer grill nights. A game on. Teammates passing through.
Somebody laughing too loud by the firepit.
Enough bodies to keep the house from saying anything honest.
Now there was only Lucy, Dottie, me, and the kind of silence that made every object in the room look sterile.
The charcoal kitchen. The stone fireplace.
The oversized couch. The glass looking out over the lake.
The expensive speakers I had not turned on in weeks.
The big TV gone black above the low console, unused.
The compression boots folded beside the couch because I had left them there before the Denver trip and forgotten about them.
A team hoodie thrown over the back of one kitchen stool.
Water bottles lined up near the sink like they had formed a support group.
My house looked good.
That was the problem.
It looked good, and suddenly I could see every place it did not look lived in.
Dottie solved the silence by sitting down in the entry and sneezing.
Lucy blinked. I looked at the dog.
Dottie looked back at me like she had found the acoustics disappointing.
“Bless you,” I said.
Lucy’s mouth twitched. It was small. Fleeting. But I caught it because my entire nervous system had apparently been assigned to monitor Lucy Thomas’s mouth for signs of mercy.
“Can I take your coat?” I asked.
Lucy looked over her shoulder at me.
For half a second, I thought she was going to close the coat around herself again and tell me no.
Instead, she slipped the leash from one hand to the other and shrugged out of the wool.
The motion pulled her sweater tighter across her shoulders, loosened another curl near her cheek, and did something painful to the center of my chest.
“Thanks,” she said.
I took the garment carefully, like handling it wrong might send her running.
It smelled faintly like cold air and her perfume, something clean and soft I remembered too well and not enough.
I hung it in the entry closet beside three of my own jackets and immediately regretted how much I liked seeing it there.
Dottie’s tail thumped once. Lucy glanced down. “Can I?”
“Yeah.” My voice came out rough, so I cleared it. “Yeah, she’s good. Let her loose.”
Lucy unclipped the leash. Dottie looked at her, looked at me, then trotted straight across my living room and launched herself onto the middle cushion of my couch with the confidence of someone who had reviewed the deed and found her name on it.
Lucy froze.
Dottie turned in a circle twice, scratched one paw against the throw pillow, and collapsed with a satisfied grunt.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Honestly, I respect a woman who knows what she wants.”
“She is not usually that rude.” Lucy laughed. Not the kind of laugh I wanted to earn and keep in a jar like a lunatic. But real enough that it moved through the room and changed the temperature of the place.
I had owned this house for years. Had brought in furniture, changed light fixtures, argued with contractors, bought a grill too large for any reasonable household of one, installed shelves I had not filled, and paid a guy an obscene amount of money to make sure the fireplace could turn on with one button because apparently money made laziness elegant.
None of it had ever made the house feel as alive as Lucy laughing at her dog on my couch.
I crossed to the fireplace control before I could stand there staring at her like an idiot. The gas caught with a soft click and a low rush, flames climbing behind the glass. Warm orange light spread across the stone and flickered over Lucy’s face.
She looked back toward the lake. “It’s beautiful,” she said quietly.
My hand stilled on the switch. I had heard people say that before. Teammates. My mom. Real estate agents. Some guy from the team’s finance office who came by once to drop something off and spent ten minutes talking about property value until I nearly walked into the lake on purpose.
From Lucy, the words landed differently.
“Yeah,” I said, because anything else would have given too much away.
She stepped closer to the windows, leaving space between herself and the glass. No fingerprints. No touch. Just looking.
I watched her reflection instead of her back.
It felt less obvious and somehow worse. In the glass, her face softened around the edges, curiosity slipping through the cracks exhaustion had made in her armor.
She was still in office clothes, but the night had undone her a little.
Sweater sleeves pushed to her forearms. Trousers creased from too many hours sitting at a desk.
One earring missing. Glasses catching firelight.
She looked like she had been fighting all day and had set down the sword only because her hand hurt.
“The lake freezes dark out here,” she said.
“Yeah. Wind hits this side pretty hard, so the snow doesn’t sit clean for long.”
“You can see the whole bend.”
“In summer, it’s better.” I shoved my hands into my pockets because they had started wanting things they had no business wanting. “Dock goes out from the left side. There’s a firepit closer to the water. Chairs. Grill.”
“Of course there’s a grill.”
“I’m from Minnesota. It came with my birth certificate.”
She glanced back at me, and that little almost-smile appeared again. “You grill in January, don’t you?”
“That feels like an accusation.”
“It is.”
“I grill responsibly in January.”
“There is no responsible way to grill in January.”
“That’s what people without vision say.”
Her smile held for one second too long, then slipped into something quieter as she looked around the living room again.
I felt it when she noticed the mantel.
Not because she said anything. Lucy was too careful for that. But her gaze paused, caught on the only framed picture in the room that was not some generic lake photograph a designer had convinced me to buy because apparently walls needed “texture.”
Northbend High. Section championship. A pile of teenage boys in navy and white, grinning like we had invented joy.
The plaque front and center. Coach Whittaker standing behind us with a look on his face that suggested he had aged ten years in one season.
Mase making some stupid hand sign. Simon crying and pretending he wasn’t.
And me in the middle with damp hair, a swollen grin, and an L still hidden under my glove tape where the camera could not see it.
The fireplace crackled softly behind the glass.
I should have moved the photo before she came in. Which was insane, because twelve hours ago I had no idea my ex would ever walk into my house. Still, shame moved through me on reflex. Not because the picture was bad. Because it was honest in a way most of the house was not.
A boy before everything broke. A version of me who still believed wanting something badly enough meant it would stay.
“You kept that one,” she said.
Her voice was gentle.
I looked at the frame instead of her. “Mom gave it to me when I bought the place.”
“And you put it on the mantel?”
“Where else was I supposed to put it?”
“That was almost a normal answer.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.”
Her mouth curved faintly, but her eyes stayed on the photo. “I remember that night.”
Every muscle in my body went careful. “Yeah,” I said.
She turned back toward the lake before the memory could get teeth. For a minute, neither of us said anything. Dottie sighed from the couch, full-bodied and dramatic, then rearranged herself so one paw hung off the cushion.
Lucy looked over. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“She is shedding on your couch.”
“Shortcake, I spend most of my life surrounded by hockey gear. A dog on my couch is the cleanest thing that’s happened to me all week.”
Lucy’s eyes flicked to mine at the nickname.
My stomach dropped. “Sorry.”
She held my gaze for a breath, then looked away. “It’s okay.”
It was not forgiveness. I knew that. But it was still something. I took it like a man starving enough to be grateful for crumbs and tried not to hate myself for the hunger.
“Bourbon?” I asked.
Lucy turned from the glass. “That was the drink?”
“You agreed to one.”
“I did.”
“I have bourbon.”
“I gathered that from the bourbon question.”
There she was. Tired, guarded, standing in my house with firelight in her hair, still capable of making me feel like a teenage boy who had just been corrected in public and enjoyed it too much.