3. Briggs
brIGGS
The service takes forty-seven minutes total.
I know because I checked my watch at the start and at the end, which is something I’ve always done in situations I can’t control. If you mark the time, you can at least give it some sort of boundary.
I sat in the front row and kept my eyes on the middle distance, somewhere over the casket. After it was over, I looked to the ground, receiving condolences from people I half recognized—Ziggy’s friends, guys from the neighborhood, a woman who said she used to babysit us both.
My dad sat beside me in his loaner chair from Danny’s shop, listening rather than engaging. I’m not sure if it’s the grief or the stroke that’s turned him inward, but the quiet is different from how he used to be.
The latter took some things I know for sure. His mobility, some of his strength, the left side of his face, which used to move more when he smiled. Words go missing on him mid-sentence now. He stops, waits for one to come back, and then keeps going.
Ziggy had spent the last eight months managing all of it. Now that he’s gone, I’ll have to find a proper substitute.
As we wait out the last of the chatter, the crowd thins to twenty and then to ten. Danny is doing something with the funeral home staff near the tent, so I squat to my dad’s level and ask, “You wanna go see Mom?”
“Obviously, I do,” he mutters.
I guide the chair across the dead turf toward the marker.
She’s been in this ground for twenty-four years. A lifetime—literally as long as Ziggy lived, a piece of morbid math that makes my stomach drop. The stone is a double; her details are finished on the left, while my father’s wait on the right.
He bought both plots the week we buried her and has been paying on a spot beside his own grave ever since. Growing up, I thought that was the bleakest thing I’d ever heard. Standing here now, ten feet from the fresh dirt where they put my brother, I think I finally get it.
Every person he ever loved is on this lawn.
“I’m getting you some help,” I say quietly. “Someone for the house while I’m in Charlotte.” My dad’s jaw tightens, and I offer the title carefully. “An assistant.”
The physical therapist says he’ll work his way up to using a walker and eventually a cane, but for now, it’s the chair. If everything keeps going the way it has been, he’ll regain most of what he lost. Most.
“Don’t need one of those,” he grumbles.
“It won’t be forever. You could use someone for now.”
“Had someone,” he grumbles.
“Yeah.” I gesture briefly toward the grave. “Well.”
“Don’t want a stranger in my house. You’re not going to be here, so what’s it to you?”
My return trip to Charlotte is only days away now. He’s hit the nail on the head, same as always. I’m an expert at leaving. I’ve been practicing that exit since the moment I turned eighteen.
Las Vegas is a room I’d rather keep under lock and key. Too many past versions of me are loitering on these corners, and I’m not looking for a reunion. If it weren’t for my father—if I weren’t currently standing on the dirt for my brother’s burial—I’d likely never step foot in this valley again.
“Please just take the help,” I reply, ignoring the jab. “I don’t want you to push too hard and undo all the progress you’ve made.”
He taps a finger on his thigh. “I don’t want somebody around my house who looks at me like I’m incapable.”
My face softens. “I know that.”
“Ziggy never once looked at me like that.”
“I know that, too.”
My little brother had been a lot of things. He was careless, impulsive, constitutionally incapable of thinking past the next good time. And we hadn’t spoken since Dad came home from the hospital. There are reasons for that, and they’re not small ones.
But he’d done some things right. He’d shown up every day for the last eight months. He made sure our dad ate and slept and didn’t disappear into the silence of his lonely house. That’s not nothing. It’s worth a whole lot in my books.
“Hey, you two!” Danny comes over and puts a hand on my dad’s shoulder. “There’s a nice spread back at my place. People are heading over there now. Marlene made that rice thing, Murph. The one you like.”
My dad’s expression shifts from miserable to vaguely delighted. Whatever Marlene’s specialty dish is, it’s doing more for him in five seconds than I’ve managed in the last year.
“I’ll be there in a bit,” I say. “You guys go on ahead.”
Danny looks at me. “Briggs—”
“I need a moment with my brother, and then I’ll go settle things with the funeral home,” I say casually. “Head on out—I’ll catch up in a minute.”
I stand there and watch as they head back toward the gravel walkway, their figures blurring until they’re just two dark shapes moving among the headstones beneath a dull, overcast November sky.
Turning around, I see the tent is already deserted, its folding chairs stacked in neat, unfeeling rows. They look pointlessly stark now. That’s when I spot a figure standing by herself near the fresh earth.
My stomach turns—Ophelia Andrews. If she had any instinct for self-preservation, she’d stay far away, because she’s the very last person on Earth I want to deal with right now.
Naturally, she isn’t wearing mourning black. She’s dressed in Carolina blue—the exact shade I once foolishly told her brought out her strawberry blonde curls, back when I was naive enough to say things like that.
Carolina blue looks real good on you, Ophelia.
Just looking at her now makes my throat go bitter. I’ve never been any good at neatly locking away history; no matter how well I put on a front, the old wounds always manage to bleed through when I least need them to.
I clear my throat, expecting her to join the rest of the crowd heading for the cars, but she doesn’t move an inch.
“I’m sure Ziggy would’ve been thrilled you made it,” I say, my voice coming out like sandpaper. “But the show’s over now.”
She looks up, her expression a mess of agony. “I came here for you. I figured you might need someone.”
I genuinely don’t know what to do with that. Two years ago, I would’ve accepted it at face value. This is a person who once loved me showing up because she thought I was drowning.
But this version of me—the performative machine that’s been through the specific sequence of shit that led to this moment—would rather tell Ophelia to go find a new life in hell. Maybe my brother could help her settle in.
“I’m fine,” I say.
She purses her plum-painted lips. “You’re always fine.”
“Then why the hell are you here?” I snap.
“Because being fine and being okay aren’t the same thing, Briggs. I know the difference with you. I always have.”
My heart clenches, a sharp jitter under the skin. “I don’t need your help. I don’t want it, either.”
“Fine, I’m going.” She holds up her palms in a gesture of defeat.
“One day, the hockey is going to be finished, you know? It ends for everyone eventually. And you’re going to look around and realize you spent the whole time keeping people at arm’s length.
There won’t be anyone left standing close enough to you when the lights go out. ”
The hit lands clean, right where she aimed it. It’s a perfectly aimed strike, and worse, it’s entirely true. I quickly shove the recognition down into the dark where I don’t have to look at it.
“That’s hilarious, coming from you,” I say, my voice going flat. “Spare me the sermon.”
She shakes her head, then turns and walks away. It didn’t take much to send her packing; I should’ve expected it. Flight over fight, every single time. Just like my brother.
I watch that strawberry hair bounce until she disappears behind the gate, waiting for a relief that never arrives.
Left to the silence now, I sit on the concrete border and stare at the new granite. The earth hasn’t even settled into its boundaries yet. ZIGMUND KEANE MAXWELL. Loving son and brother. Gone too soon.
Well, fuck. The reality of it pushes back harder than I can shove it down.
The pressure arrives in my chest, a crushing weight that refuses to move. My throat closes, and my eyes start to burn. I press the heels of my hands against them until I see static, because if I let the gap open, the whole machine is going to fail.
So I do the trick. I breathe. I count it down.
Ziggy and I hadn’t had a real conversation in nearly two years. After the stroke, we managed two phone calls total. That was it. He moved into the house. I mailed the checks. We figured out the logistics and stopped there.
Before that, I’d stopped counting days and started counting seasons. Last offseason, the start of this one. I should’ve flown back to the valley when I had the chance, knocked on that door and stayed until the air was clear.
But I was very busy being fine.
Now, I’m three days late and a whole lifetime short.
I stay on the cold ground until my knees start to lock up. When the sound of soft footsteps lands on the grass behind me, I don’t bother looking.
If this is another woman here to weep about what my brother meant to her, she can do it in the next section.
“I’ll save you the trouble,” I say gruffly. “Zig told you you were special, you probably believe him, and maybe you were—I genuinely don’t care anymore. But I would really appreciate five minutes alone with my brother.”
Silence. Then a laugh, short and surprised.
I whip around to find a woman standing ten feet back with a clipboard under her arm. Her hair is a chaotic blend of red, copper, and white threaded all through it, like a calico cat.
She’s not one of Zig’s. I know because she’s looking at me without an ounce of pity. No careful handling, no mourning-period mercy.
She’s looking at me like I’m a fucking nuisance.
“For God’s sake, I wasn’t sleeping with him,” she snaps. “I’m the one who dug the hole.”
I stand up from the border, my brain scrambling to catch up. “The funeral home sent you?”
“Sutton and Sons. Yes.” She gestures with the clipboard. “I’ve got the paperwork. You’re listed as the payee.”
“Right.” I cross the grass toward her. Up close, she has a jagged cut healing along her brow and dirt smudged down the sleeve of a mint-green coat. “You dug this this morning?”
“Yesterday, actually.” She gives me a tight, professional smile. “Started bright and early.”
I frown, stuck on the image. She’s five foot seven, slender all over. And she was out here on a Saturday morning, digging a hole in the desert for my little brother.
I’d have expected someone burlier. Someone with forearms like tree trunks. She looks more like she should be in a coffee shop with a sketchbook than standing in a cemetery.
Then again, I’ve spent my life throwing my body at other men at high speed, and nobody believes what I do until they see the jersey. The hair doesn’t help. Neither do the flowers on my neck or the fact that I look like I should be loading an amp into a van.
The calico watches me with raised brows while my phone buzzes again. I ignore it.
Ted has called every four hours since Friday. He has a plan and a timeline for when the Kings need me back. My brother’s death has inconvenienced both.
“Hold on.” She scans the sheets, then turns the board toward me with a pen. “Here. And here.”
I sign them with a loose, careless hand.
She checks the ink, tears off a yellow copy, and hands it over.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
She looks up. “Evie Sutton.”
“Ray’s daughter, then.”
Her expression warms. “You know my dad?”
“He introduced himself earlier.” I pause. “He’s good at his job.”
He’d found us in the parking lot, didn’t wait for us to come to him. He crouched to my dad’s level on the asphalt, took my dad’s hand in both of his, and just waited.
My dad started crying, which he’s been doing lately in these sudden waves I don’t know how to handle, and Ray sat with it. Didn’t rush it, didn’t say anything engineered to make it stop. He just stayed until it passed, then straightened up and told us he’d take good care of him.
It was exactly the right thing to say.
“He is,” Evie says. “One of the best.”
I trace the dirt smudged from her cheek down to her sleeve. She has silver rings on half her fingers and a small tattoo on the inside of her wrist. I can’t make it out from here, and I’m not going to lean in. I think she’d smack me.
“You always have to dig the graves?” I ask.
“Last-minute job after the machine.” She caps the pen. “Happens more than you’d think. Weekends are popular for funerals, and we can’t always contract out. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.”
I give her a skeptical look. “Is that right?”
She snorts. “No. If it were, I wouldn’t be a hundred thousand in debt, and I’d have a working car. Gas station hot dogs aren’t a sustainable food group, either.”
“Mm. I’ve had a few of those on the road.”
She smiles, and it lights the whole goddamn cemetery up. I catch a dusting of freckles I’d missed. “So you know they taste better at two in the morning.”
“Absolutely.”
I tuck the yellow copy into my coat. My phone buzzes again.
“You need to get that?” She tips her chin toward my pocket. “You’ve ignored it three times. Might be family.”
“It’s not. It’s my agent.”
“Hm.” She closes the board and tucks it away.
The Kings play Tuesday. Ted has said it in every text since I left. I’ve got four days before I’m back on the ice, performing fine for a full arena of people who need me that way.
“He was really young,” I say. I don’t know why the words slip out. “My brother. Car accident.”
She nods once. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”
The back of my nose stings. “Me too.”
She shifts her weight into the silence. “Car accidents are the leading cause of accidental death in the US for people under forty-five. About a hundred and fifteen a day.”
The statistic chips away at me. I carry enough resentment for my brother to fill the valley, and we haven’t exchanged a single word in two years. She isn’t wrong—it’s just one of the many ways a life ends, and in her trade, it’s likely a daily occurrence. But the clinical delivery still stings.
“Sorry,” I say roughly, “is my brother’s death just a piece of unremarkable trivia to you?”
She blinks, her jaw tightening as she processes the hit. “No. I’m not sure why I shared that,” she says, rubbing the back of her neck. “Fun fact, I suppose.”
I gnaw on my lip, the restlessness jittering under my skin. “That’s not a fun fact.”
“No, I understand.” She lets the silence settle between us for a beat. “It’s entirely fucked-up.”
“We weren’t even on speaking terms, you know? There was nothing but silence between us when he died. That’s the part that’s actually fucked-up.”
She exhales a long, heavy breath through her nose. “Shit happens.”
A short, humorless laugh gets away from me. “Yeah. Shit happens, and then you die, and someone talks about it like it’s just more weather.”
She gives me that tight smile again and taps her clipboard. “The paperwork is finished. Contact the office if you have any questions. Good luck, Mr. Maxwell.”
“Briggs,” I say, correcting her.
She pauses mid-turn, her sharp eyes searching mine. Then, “Good luck, Briggs.”