31. Buzz
BUZZ
NOW
By four in the morning, the lake looked like something the world had forgotten.
The sky was still black at the edges, softening only slightly where the far tree line cut against it.
Snow packed beneath my shoes with a dry, familiar crunch, and every breath I dragged in burned clean all the way down my throat.
The cold made everything honest. Lungs. Legs.
Thoughts. There was no room for performance out here.
No crowd noise. No locker room chirping.
No camera waiting for the grin everyone expected from Buzz Burns.
Just me, the frozen lake, and the rhythm of my feet moving over the same road I had run almost every morning since I bought the house.
Four miles when my body felt good.
Six when my head did not.
Today, I had told myself four.
My head, unfortunately, had other plans.
Lucy Thomas had been in it since the second I woke up. Not in the wrecked, midnight way she used to come to me after I saw her in the arena and pretended I was fine. Not like punishment. Not like guilt dragging its teeth through the inside of my chest.
This was worse. This was hope. Careful, stupid, badly behaved hope that had no respect for a man trying to keep his expectations in check.
I rounded the bend near the old shoreline access, where the road narrowed and the lake opened wider on my left.
There were houses tucked back from the water, their windows dark, roofs loaded with snow.
When I was a kid, before any of us knew what hockey might turn into, Grandpa Hal used to bring us out here when the ice was thick enough.
Kendrick complaining because Thane took everything too seriously.
Thane pretending not to care that I was faster.
Me falling because I was looking at the puck instead of where my skates were going.
Grandma Ruth had stood on the shore in a coat that made her look twice her size, holding a thermos and yelling, “If one of you breaks a wrist, I am not explaining this to your mother.”
Then she had poured us hot chocolate with extra marshmallows like she was not the one who had packed our skates in the first place.
Love, in my family, had always come with warnings and food.
I ran harder for the last hill, the air cutting against my face.
My thighs burned. My pulse steadied. The house appeared between the trees as I crested the rise, all glass and dark siding, porch light glowing gold against the snow.
It looked permanent from out here. Like the kind of place a man bought when he understood what home meant.
I had bought it before I understood much of anything.
Back then, I thought staying in Northbend would be enough. A lake house. A contract. A number on a jersey kids wore into grocery stores. I thought if I built enough proof around myself, eventually it would become a life.
Then Lucy had walked into my house weeks ago and made the whole place feel unfinished.
My watch whirred against my wrist at the end of the driveway.
Seven miles.
I slowed to a walk, hands on my hips, breath coming hard and white in the cold.
Paper Lantern opened its doors to the regulars at six, but Naomi had learned my schedule by day three and started leaving Lucy’s order ready if I texted from the truck.
Lucy had not thanked me in any clean way. She had accepted the coffee with guarded little comments, one eyebrow raised, like every morning was a hearing and I was presenting evidence.
“Your accomplice did well today,” she had said on Wednesday.
“Naomi is a professional,” I had told her.
“Naomi is a traitor.”
Dottie had been licking whipped cream from the cup at Lucy’s feet, tail sweeping the rug like a metronome of betrayal.
I had left after that. Every morning. Threshold. Coffee. Pup cup.
Some mornings, she looked at the cup like she wanted to trust it.
Some mornings, she looked at me like she hated that she wanted to.
One morning did not earn me anything. A week did not earn me anything. However many mornings we had stacked together, quiet and careful, still did not make a promise. It only made a pattern.
I was trying not to get cocky about a pattern.
Inside, the house was warm and too quiet.
I showered fast, changed into team sweats, and made the bed because my mother had raised me with standards and guilt in equal measure.
By five ten, I was in my truck with wet hair tucked beneath a snapback, the heater blasting, headed toward Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Hal’s place with my stomach already awake.
Their house sat on a corner lot in the older part of Northbend, the kind of neighborhood where people had lived long enough to know who shoveled late and who left Christmas lights up too long. The porch light was on when I pulled in. It was always on when Grandma knew one of us was coming.
I let myself in through the mudroom.
“Don’t track half the county in here,” Grandma called from somewhere deeper in the house.
“I missed you too.”
Grandpa Hal sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper folded into a square beside his coffee, even though I knew for a fact he read most of the news on his tablet before Grandma came downstairs. The paper was theater. Grandpa liked props.
Grandma Ruth stood at the stove in a plaid robe and slippers, her silver hair pinned back with the kind of clip that had survived decades of family emergencies, holidays, and whatever happened the year Kendrick tried to deep-fry a turkey.
She was small enough that people who did not know her made the mistake of assuming she could be moved.
People who knew her understood that Ruth Burns had been born with a center of gravity stronger than weather. I crossed the kitchen and kissed her cheek.
She patted my jaw once, fingers cool from the orange juice carton. There it was, the one little-boy moment she still got away with. “You shaved badly.”
“I shaved in the dark.”
“You own lights.”
“I was preserving electricity.”
“You were preserving electricity, not smarts.” She handed me a carton of eggs. “Cook.”
I took the eggs. “Good morning to you too.”
Grandpa Hal turned a page he had already read. “She has been looking forward to this since yesterday.”
“I have not,” Grandma hushed.
“She took the sausages out last night.”
“That is called preparation.”
“She told the butcher you were coming.”
“That is called conversation.” Grandma pointed a wooden spoon at him. “Now, Harold Burns, if you want breakfast, you will stop that yammering.”
I set the eggs on the counter and grinned. “Full Irish?”
“You offered,” Grandma Ruth sang out. “And I heard full Irish.” She moved toward the coffeemaker with the satisfied expression of a woman whose interpretation had become law.
I washed my hands, then started pulling things from the refrigerator.
Eggs. Sausage. Rashers wrapped in butcher paper.
Tomatoes. Mushrooms. Leftover potatoes my grandmother had absolutely saved for this purpose while pretending coincidence was real.
Beans from the pantry because Grandma Ruth had decided years ago that if something came from a can but went into a saucepan, it counted as cooking.
The kitchen filled slowly. Heat from the stove.
Coffee. Butter hitting the skillet. The faint spice of sausage browning.
The cold still clinging to my sleeves from outside.
Grandpa Hal’s paper rustling. Grandma Ruth correcting my heat level even though I had been trusted to cook my own food for years.
“Too high,” she said.
“It’s medium.”
“Medium on that burner is not medium.”
“I’m aware of how burners work.”
Grandpa Hal lifted his mug. “It has been temperamental since 2018.”
“It is a stove,” I said.
“It has moods,” Grandma replied.
I turned the tomatoes cut side down in the pan. “This family explains a lot about me.”
Grandpa Hal made a low sound that might have been a laugh.
Grandma Ruth carried her coffee to the table and settled into her chair. “Speaking of explanations.” She smiled into her mug. “How is Lucy?”
I kept my eyes on the pan. I should have expected it.
Grandma Ruth could smuggle fudge into an arena under three blankets and manipulate a seating chart with a tote bag, but emotional subtlety was not her preferred weapon when she had already decided the room could survive the truth. “She’s good,” I muttered.
“That is an answer you give the dentist.”
I moved the mushrooms around. “She’s busy.”
“That is an answer you give someone at church when you want to leave.”
“She’s Lucy,” I sighed finally.
The kitchen went quieter.
Grandma Ruth’s face softened in a way that made her look, for half a second, not smaller but older. Not weak. Never that. Just more human than the force of nature she preferred to be.
“She came to Matt’s,” Grandma said. “And now you bring her coffee.”
I glanced over. “How do you know that?”
Grandma looked offended. “I have sources.”
“Naomi?”
“You don’t know all the people I know.”
Grandpa Hal folded the paper with care. “Marion.”
Grandma Ruth shot him a look. He drank his coffee.
I laughed under my breath and turned back to the stove before my face gave too much away. “I’m not making it a thing.” I cleared my throat. “I’m trying,” I said, quieter.
“We know,” she replied.
I plated breakfast because moving food around was easier than standing in the middle of my grandparents’ kitchen with every feeling I owned exposed beside a pan of mushrooms. Grandma Ruth complained that I gave Grandpa too many potatoes.
He joked he was a growing boy. She told him the only direction he was growing was sideways.
I laughed, and the sound came out easier than it had before.