32. Lucy #2
Northbend thawed in pieces. Snow melted into black piles along curbs. The lake ice dulled under weak sun. Rain came one Tuesday morning in a cold, steady sheet that made the whole city smell like wet pavement, old leaves, and winter finally giving up.
That was the morning Freya stopped by my office with her coat over one arm and her curls pulled back from her face in a scarf the color of marigolds.
“You’re leaving early,” I observed.
Freya paused in my doorway. “That sounded almost like concern.”
“It was observation.”
“Mm-hmm.” She stepped in long enough to steal one of the wrapped mints from the little dish on my shelf, which I had bought for visitors and apparently stocked only for Freya. “I’m making a house call to Grandma Ruth.”
I looked up fully. “How is she doing?”
Freya’s mouth curved. “Stubborn as hell but healing faster than most of the athletes on the roster.”
Relief moved through me before I could organize it into something less revealing. “Good,” I said, turning back to the schedule on my screen.
“Very casual,” Freya teased.
“I am allowed to ask about an injured person.”
“You are. I am allowed to notice when you know which injured person I mean before I use her last name.”
I gave her a look. She smiled with all her teeth. Dottie lifted her head from her bed, decided Freya had no whipped cream, and went back to sleep.
“Ty checks on her every morning?” I asked, because apparently my mouth had decided we were no longer maintaining basic defenses.
Freya leaned one shoulder against the bookshelf. “Breakfast in the morning, from what I hear. He brings food, she complains about being supervised, Hal pretends not to enjoy the extra company. Very Burns family. Much starch.”
I pictured it too easily. Ty in the old kitchen, moving around with that restless competence he had when care needed somewhere to go. Ruth giving orders from a chair. Hal reading his newspaper like a man hiding amusement behind national events.
My chest warmed. That was the part I did not know how to fight.
Wanting him was one thing. My body had been betraying me on that front since he walked back into my life with the same blue eyes and a better understanding of silence.
But knowing him like this, seeing the structure of the man beneath the charm, was harder to defend against.
Freya unwrapped her mint. “You made a face.”
“I did not.”
“You did. It was soft and panicked. Very you.”
“I regret allowing you into my office.”
“You didn’t. Bea did, emotionally, months ago.” She popped the mint into her mouth and studied me. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Try again.”
I exhaled through my nose and leaned back in my chair. The lamp cast warm light across the desk even though the morning was gray. Rain threaded down the window. My coffee sat near my keyboard, half-finished and still warm.
I could have lied better.
I was tired of lying well.
“I think I keep waiting for him to get tired,” I sighed.
Freya’s face softened, but not with pity. Freya did not do pity. She did presence, which was both kinder and more difficult to escape. “Of showing up?” she asked.
I nodded once.
The words had been sitting in me for weeks, gathering weight one quiet morning at a time. I had not wanted to give them shape because shape made them real.
“He says he’ll wait,” I said. “And he is. He says he won’t push, and he doesn’t. He says he won’t make me decide before I’m ready, and then he just...” I looked at the coffee cup. “Doesn’t.”
Freya came farther into the room and sat in the chair across from my desk. She did not make the moment dramatic. She simply sat, one ankle crossed over the other, coat in her lap, attention steady. “Healing takes time,” she said.
“I know.”
“And work.”
I looked at her.
She held my gaze. “Not his work instead of yours. Not your work instead of his. Both.”
My entire body flushed.
“I am not saying forgive him,” Freya added. “That is yours. I am not saying trust him because he brought coffee. Coffee is not a sacrament, despite what Naomi may claim.”
A laugh slipped out of me, quiet and reluctant.
Freya smiled. “I’m saying if something is healing, eventually you have to participate in the healing too. Even if participating is just admitting you like the damn coffee.”
“I do like the coffee.”
“That was brave. Alert the press.”
“Freya.”
Her smile softened again. “You are allowed to take your time, Lucy. You are also allowed to notice that time is passing.”
That stayed in the room after she left. It stayed while I answered emails.
It stayed while I adjusted player availability notes and sent Sarah the latest travel changes.
It stayed when Dottie woke from her nap and wandered to the door fifteen minutes before the coffee delivery arrived, then sat down as if she had a meeting.
“You are getting smug,” I told her.
She looked at me over one shoulder. Dottie was not choosing Ty over me. She was simply trusting the shape of something because no one had taught her to be afraid of it.
The team got stuck coming back from Denver two nights later.
A mechanical delay first. Then weather. Then a crew timing issue that made three different staff members use the phrase rolling disruption, which sounded polite for a day coming apart one travel update at a time.
By eight the next morning, the Frosthawks were still not in Northbend.
I was at the arena anyway because schedules did not care whether players were trapped in airport chairs several states away.
The building had that hollow, post-road-trip feeling.
Too quiet in places that were usually loud.
Too much coffee in the wrong rooms. Staff moving through corridors with phones pressed to their ears, trying to rearrange the day around a team that had not landed yet.
I did not expect anything.
That was the reasonable thing.
Ty was not in town. The team was delayed. He had more important things to think about than my morning routine.
At nine twelve, there was a knock at my door. Naomi’s delivery driver stood in the hallway with rain on his jacket and a Paper Lantern bag in one hand. “Lucy Thomas?”