24. Evie
EVIE
We’re nearly an hour late to Sam Hartwell’s because Briggs lost the ability to operate a door handle once he was done fucking me in front of the bathroom mirror.
“They’re going to know exactly why we’re late,” I say from his passenger seat.
“Probably.” He backs the truck out and navigates onto a street where the massive oaks are so ancient they lean over the asphalt to whisper to each other. “Augie can always tell. He’s like a truffle pig for everyone’s secrets.”
While Briggs’s place was nice, Myers Park feels like a different dimension. The houses retreat behind brick walls and manicured boxwood, and every lawn is that impossible, deep-sea green. In February, when my entire city is the color of a paper grocery bag.
Hartwell’s driveway itself is large enough to host a viewing in. There are already half a dozen SUVs waiting there by the time we pull up.
“You said this was gonna be a low-key dinner,” I remind him.
“It is.”
“This looks like a party, Briggs.”
“It’s just the inner circle.” He cuts the engine and studies me. “You’re not going to bolt, are you?”
“Mm, I think I can handle a defenseman’s living room.”
He does a tight, clicking thing with his jaw.
“Hey.” I catch his hand before he can flee the car. “I’m good. Are you good?”
“I’m good,” he replies. “Just haven’t done this before.”
“What? Ate dinner with your friends?”
“Brought someone along to meet them.”
“I’ll be on my best behavior. I won’t even talk that much about neo-Marxism or the anarchy of Phil’s ordering system.”
He snorts. “It’s not that. I want you to be exactly who you are. I’m much more worried about them.”
“Why? Do they not know how to talk to a woman who’s touched a lot of corpses? Because I can tone that down. I have a whole small-talk mode.”
He gives me a deadpan look. “How about a serious mode?”
“Sorry, doing that now.” I give a firm nod, pursing my lips. “What are you really concerned about here?”
“I just want you to like them,” he admits, a furrow in his brow. “I want you to like it here, wherever I am.”
I should say something light. Deflect, defuse, keep the ground under us level. But the sentence lodges somewhere under my ribs. He’s leaving doors open again, and I’m the one who has to decide whether to walk through or shut them.
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Maxwell.”
I press a slow, lingering kiss to his mouth across the center console, my fingers finding the notch of his open collar. After what we did an hour ago, the gentleness feels like a secret handed over—a quiet admission that the man who just took me apart can still be this pliable in my hands.
This is the weekend experiment, I tell myself. A couple of days of chasing every impulse without the weight of expectations. The problem is I’m already grieving the end of the trial run.
He leans in to press his forehead against mine for a heartbeat, his breath warm on my skin, before he pulls away and finally kills the ignition.
“Right, then. Let’s go perform for the public for a few hours.”
Sam Hartwell answers the door with a dish towel draped over his shoulder and a two-year-old clamped to his leg like a very cute barnacle. He’s built like what he is—a veteran defenseman, broad and a little battered, gray coming in early at the temples.
“Maxie’s finally here!” He spots me, and his entire expression softens. “And you must be Evie. I’ve been thoroughly briefed by two different old men, so I feel like we’re already acquainted.”
“Is that right?”
“Our fathers like to gossip.” He jerks his chin toward Briggs. “It’s a whole ecosystem. Come in.”
I hand over the bottle of wine I forced Briggs to stop for. “I have no idea if this is drinkable. The man at the shop seemed very confident.”
Sam reads the label, raising a brow. “This is a vintage Sancerre.”
“Good,” Briggs replies. “It was two hundred dollars.”
Inside the big brick house, it’s warm and vibrantly loud.
There’s a fire crackling and a playlist heavy on nineties R they’ll only bore you with talk about neutral zone traps.”
I give Briggs a wide-eyed smile, and that’s the last I see of him for a while.
Lily takes me down a hall lined with canvases—big, textural abstracts in oxblood and gold—into a converted sunroom that smells like linseed oil. I make a noise I’m not proud of.
“Did you paint these?”
“Guilty. I sell a few; mostly, I just make Sam hang them.” She clears brushes off a stool for me. “I heard you studied art in college.”
“A lifetime ago at UNLV.” I touch the edge of a canvas without meaning to. “I don’t really—I don’t make much anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Time. Money. The usual reasons people stop doing the thing they love.”
“Those are just the surface reasons,” Lily replies, handing me a glass of pink wine. “The real ones run deeper. But I won’t psychoanalyze someone I met four minutes ago. Come on—let’s meet the rest of the group. They’re much better company than my husband’s hockey buddies.”
She guides me back toward the kitchen, where two women are huddled around the island over wine. One is Lauren, a hairstylist sporting a bright streak of blue in her bangs, who’s here with someone named Halloran.
He’s Sam’s defensive partner, they tell me, a quiet Irishman who keeps to himself. The second woman, Zarah, recently got engaged to Duval, the Kings’ goaltender.
“Ah, so you’re the funeral home worker?” Zarah asks. “Your reputation precedes you.”
I catch myself smiling at the countertop. “That’s me.”
“Is it as bizarre as everyone thinks?”
“Most of the time, it’s just mountains of paperwork, dealing with grieving families, and coworkers who are a little eccentric.” I take a sip of the wine, secretly praying it isn’t another two-hundred-dollar bottle. That’d just be wasted on my palate. “What about you?”
“I’m a labor and delivery nurse,” Zarah replies.
“So we’re basically bookends,” I say. “You handle the arrivals, I handle the departures.”
All three woman laugh, delighted, and my chest goes warm at the sound.
“And how do you feel about being partnered with men who get paid to take a punch?”
“You build up a tolerance for the punching,” Lily says. It’s the losing that’s the real problem. He comes home after a bad game, and he’s like a ghost for forty-eight hours.”
“Every single one of them,” Zarah agrees, leaning against the counter. “You learn to give them their orbit until the frustration burns off.”
I think about Briggs retreating into silence after the Montréal loss, calling me from that hotel room just to find his way back to himself. But I don’t bother to share the thought. These women have years on me, and trying to relate would feel like an intrusion I haven’t earned.
When we’re called into the other room, dinner is waiting for us. Platters of it, spread across an antique formal table laid with mismatched linen and dozens of candles. We all crowd around it, elbows negotiating for space.
Sam carves a massive roast while Augie teases him mercilessly from a nearby barstool. “You’re hacking at it, Cap. It’s a roast, not a defensive clear.”
“Augie, have you ever operated a blade that didn’t have a boot attached to it?”
“Plenty of times.”
“Name a single instance.”
“. . . I carved a world-class jack-o’-lantern in 2009. It was a masterpiece.”
We eat and talk, and somebody spills a drink within four minutes, which nobody reacts to at all. None of them are treating me like a temporary guest, either. I keep waiting for it, and it doesn’t happen.
The table sorts itself into three conversations, and I’m in the middle of all of them.
Augie maneuvers a roasted potato right off the plate of one of the kids, who’s far too polite to stage a protest, and mimes a swoon of exaggerated gratitude with his fork.
To my left, Charlie Foster is deep into the details of an Ontario fishing expedition that nobody in the room believes for a single heartbeat.
It’s a beautiful, vibrant sort of chaos. And through the middle of it, I keep catching Briggs—mid-laugh, mid-bite, mid-argument with Duval—looking my way. Every time our eyes lock, he holds the connection and offers a slow, stupidly handsome smile that makes the room feel a dozen degrees warmer.
Somewhere between the second helping of roast and the peach pie, his phone begins its performance against the wood. He silences it without looking, but a minute later, the vibration returns, the screen lighting up his knuckles in a persistent, buzzing circle.
“You’re in high demand,” I murmur.
He glances at the display, his mouth flattening into a thin line. “It’s just Ted.” He thumbs the screen dark again. “The man’s been at me since sunrise.”
I tilt my head, the curiosity getting the better of me. “Oh yeah?”
“Just trying to earn his commission, I guess.”
“Briggs. If it’s something urgent, you should—”
“I don’t want to.” He catches my hand under the table, his mouth finding my knuckles for a lingering second. “I’m not spending your weekend here on the phone with Ted. He can take a hike.”
I let the subject drop, because I’m just as greedy for the uninterrupted time as he is.
After we polish off the peach pie and vanilla ice cream, Briggs vanishes to help Sam wrangle the toddler into pajamas, and I find myself on the back porch under the glow of a heat lamp.
Augie is there, leaning against the rail, and he’s apparently decided he’s my new best friend. “Can I let you in on a secret,” he asks, “as the man who’s been burdened with him longer than anyone else in this organization?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to volunteer it regardless.”
“I am. He’s a stubborn son of a bitch.” He points his beer toward the glass door, where Briggs is visible inside, hunkered on the rug helping Lily’s kid stack blocks into a tower.
“I’ve been begging him for three seasons to bring someone to these things.
Did you know I never even met the former fiancée? ”
I give my best performance of a woman hearing this for the first time, my eyes widening for effect. “Briggs was engaged?”
Augie goes rigid. The color drains from his face, his beer stopping halfway to his mouth. “Fuck. Shit. Oh, goddamn it.”
He begins pacing the length of the porch, dragging a frantic hand down his face like a man who’s just committed a felony. I let him suffer for a solid thirty seconds of silent panic.
“Kidding,” I say sweetly. “He told me all about Ophelia.”
He stops mid-stride, his whole face splitting into a relieved grin. “You’re a little shit, aren’t you? You fit right in with him.”
“Some people might make that case.”
“I’m keeping you.” He shakes his head, and his expression goes briefly serious.
“He’s the best guy I know and the absolute worst at letting people in, you know?
When his brother died, I thought—well, that’s the end of it.
He’s going behind the fortress for good.
We’ve lost him. And then—” He gestures at me with the bottle. “You arrived.”
“I’m just a temporary assistant,” I argue, offering a careless shrug. “I heat up his father’s dinner.”
“Yeah.” Augie studies me, the usual class-clown mask dropping away entirely. “I think you’re a hell of a lot more than that to him, Evie.”
I have to look out at the dark yard for a heartbeat, watching the heat lamps pulse against the brick. Briggs and I aren’t a couple. We aren’t even a finished conversation yet, and I’m catching a plane back to my real life after the game tomorrow.
How can we be anything at all with two thousand miles of desert and pine sitting between us?
My stomach drops, slow and total, like a coin disappearing into the dark of a well. I know exactly what’s happening. I’ve been outrunning the name of it for weeks, keeping it tucked small in my coat pocket with the rest of my secrets.
I have real, terrifyingly strong feelings for Briggs Maxwell. And I’m having a wonderful time here in his city.
I genuinely like these people. I like Lily’s textural sunroom and Zarah’s easy, clinical laugh and the way this whole loud house folds a stranger into the mix without a second thought. I love the sharp scent of woodsmoke and the way the trees create a gray tunnel overhead.
And still, I could never make a life here.
My father is in Vegas with a business he’s built brick by brick. Hazel is in Vegas, barking her loud, beautiful laugh across our favorite sticky-vinyl bar. My mother is buried in that same dry desert dirt.
My entire existence is stacked up in a beige valley.
And Briggs—his whole world is hockey. It’s in this neighborhood, in that blue-ice rink, in these people who love him. He built this life here on his own. There’s no room in it for the desert, and no version of him that follows me back into it.
What’s a girl like me to do with a man like that?