Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Nico
Miguel called late in the afternoon.
I’d been watching my phone light up for hours by then—teammates, my agent, the PR director, numbers I didn’t recognize. I let them all go to voicemail. Told myself I’d deal with them later. Kept finding reasons later hadn’t arrived yet.
When Miguel’s name came up, I answered. “Hey.”
“Don’t hey me.” Not loud—Miguel never got loud—but tight in a way I recognized. He was holding something back and doing it carefully. “Where are you?”
“Evan’s place.”
“Okay.” A beat. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m fine, Miguel.”
He didn’t push it. I heard the hum of a hotel room heater and muffled voices from a hallway. Vancouver was on a road trip. Columbus, if I remembered right. I tracked their schedule the same way I always had—not obsessively, just enough to know where my brother was at any given point in the season.
I got up from the couch. Evan was focused on his phone, giving me space. I walked into the bedroom and pushed the door mostly closed behind me.
“Nico. I woke up at six this morning to my phone blowing up. You understand that? I have an alert set for Lasers news—mostly so I can chirp you when you lose—and it goes off before I’m even out of bed.
There’s a photo of my brother kissing some guy in a parking lot.
I’m lying in a hotel bed in Columbus at six in the morning trying to figure out if what I’m looking at is real.
” An exhale. “I’ve been sitting with it all day.
Had morning skate, team meetings, film session—I got through all of it with guys coming up to me all day asking if I’d seen it, if I’d talked to you, if you were okay—and I couldn’t say what I was actually feeling because I didn’t even know yet.
I had to wait until I had a room to myself and some time to actually think before I could call you. ”
I sat on the edge of Evan’s bed. Didn’t say anything.
“I had to find out that my brother is gay from a sports blog,” Miguel said. “That’s where we are.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” His voice stayed even, but the edges had gone rough. “Because I’ve been sitting with this all day and I keep coming back to the same thing. You didn’t trust me. Out of everyone, you looked at me and decided I wasn’t someone you could tell.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Then tell me what it was like. Because from where I’m standing, that’s exactly what it looks like.”
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, staring at the floor. The words were there—I’d been arranging them in my head for hours, trying to find the version that made sense. None of them felt like enough.
“It wasn’t about you,” I said. “That’s the most honest thing I can tell you.
It was never about whether I trusted you specifically.
It was about… the game. The locker room.
The way we started in hockey.” I paused.
“I built a wall around it early and just kept adding to it. Even after things changed. Even after I knew better.”
Silence on his end.
“I’m not saying that makes it right,” I added. “I’m just trying to answer you honestly.”
“I know what the locker room’s like,” Miguel said. “I’ve been in the same league as you for five years. I’m not na?ve about it.”
“I know you’re not.”
“But Lapierre came out in October. Morelli and Savard in December.” His voice shifted and became less tight, more direct.
“It’s not the same league. It’s still not easy—I’m not saying it’s easy—but it’s different.
And at some point in the last few months, the thing you were protecting yourself from stopped being as real as it used to be.
” A beat. “And you still didn’t say anything. ”
He wasn’t wrong. I’d watched all of it and felt something loosen slightly in my chest each time—and then I’d put my phone down and gone back to exactly what I’d been doing before.
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”
“I’m not trying to be right. I’m trying to understand.” Another pause, longer. “Nico… I’ve known since you were twenty-one.”
I went still.
“College,” he said. “A frat house party. You were outside with some guy and I was across the street with Daniela. I looked up and there you were.” His voice was quiet now, measured. “I didn’t say anything because I figured you’d come to me when you were ready. I kept waiting for that.”
Nine years. He’d been carrying that for nine years, waiting for me to open a door I never opened.
“Miguel—”
“I didn’t push because it wasn’t my thing to bring up. It was yours.” The tightness came back, sharper than before. “But I’ve been waiting a long time, Nico. Years of waiting for my brother to trust me with something I already knew. And instead, I found out on the internet.”
I pressed my free hand to the back of my neck. There was nothing to say to that, no version of it that didn’t land exactly as hard as it deserved to.
“Did you think I’d have a problem with it?” he asked.
“No.” No hesitation. “Never. Not for a second.”
“Then I really don’t get it.” His voice dropped. Not angry. Something closer to hurt, which was worse. “Nico, I’m your brother. I love you. And you still didn’t tell me.”
The real answer was messier than hockey culture, messier than locker rooms and the way I’d come up.
The real answer was that keeping it hidden had become something I did automatically, a reflex so deep I’d stopped examining it.
That telling Miguel would have meant becoming a version of myself I wasn’t ready to be yet.
“It stopped being about any one person a long time ago,” I said. “It was just… how I operated. I kept it separate from everything. From everyone.” I paused. “That’s not an excuse. I’m just trying to be straight with you.”
Miguel made a short sound, not quite a laugh. “Straight with me.”
“Poor word choice.”
“Little bit.” But some of the tightness had gone out of his voice. A few seconds passed. “So, Evan. Is he the real thing?”
“Yeah.” No hesitation. “It’s serious.”
“Serious like it’s going well, or serious like you’re already gone?”
“Both.”
“Good.” He meant it. I could hear it, plain and uncomplicated. “I want to meet him. When things calm down.”
“You will.”
A longer pause. When Miguel spoke again, his voice had settled into something quieter.
“I’m not going to stay mad about this,” he said. “I want you to know that. But I am hurt. And I need you to actually hear that, not just say you get it and move on.”
“I hear it.”
“Because you do that. You acknowledge things and then you accelerate past them.”
He wasn’t wrong about that either. “I hear it,” I said again. “And I’m not moving past it. You deserved better from me. I’m going to do better.”
Another silence. Comfortable this time, or closer to it.
“Call Mom and Dad,” Miguel said. “Now, Nico. Don’t let it sit another day.”
The thought of that call sat heavy in my gut. “I know.”
“They’re not going to be angry. But they’re going to be hurt. Mom especially.” He paused. “She’s been waiting a long time for you to come to her with this.”
I hadn’t let myself think about that clearly, but I knew he was right.
“And Nico?” His voice went quieter. “I’m glad it’s out. I know it’s a disaster right now, but I’m glad you don’t have to carry it anymore.”
I exhaled for what felt like the first time all day. “Thanks, Miguel.”
“Call them.”
He hung up.
I sat on the edge of Evan’s bed for a while after that, the phone loose in my hands.
Miguel had known. Or at least suspected.
I thought about what he’d said about the locker room changing. About all the moments I could have chosen differently and hadn’t—not because anyone had given me a reason to stay silent, but because I’d convinced myself it was easier.
That was on me. Just me. Nobody else.
I pulled up my parents’ number and called before I could talk myself out of it. My mother answered before the second ring.
“Nicolás.”
Just my name. The full version, the one she used when something mattered. It landed like a punch to my sternum.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Are you all right?” First thing. Before anything else.
“I’m okay.” I glanced at the window. Later than I’d realized, with the sky going the flat gray of early evening while I wasn’t paying attention. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”
“You’re calling now.” A pause. “That’s what matters.”
I could hear my father somewhere behind her—the scrape of a chair, the clink of a glass, the familiar rhythm of their kitchen on a Saturday evening. I knew exactly what it looked like. My mother at the counter, my father at the table. Thirty years of the same Saturday.
“Mom.” I stopped. Tried again. “I should have told you. Before any of this. A long time before any of this.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I’ve known for a while,” she said carefully. “Or… I’ve suspected. Since you were young.” She paused. “I tried to make sure you knew we were safe. That you could come to us. I kept waiting for you to be ready.”
“I know you did.” And I had known. That was the part I’d never let myself look at directly—that she’d left the door open and I’d walked past it for years. “I knew the door was open. That was never the question.”
“Then I don’t understand.” Her voice stayed gentle, but underneath, it pulled tight.
“I keep thinking about all the years you were carrying this and I couldn’t help you.
That you knew you were safe and still felt like you couldn’t—” She choked on the word.
“I’m not angry, mijo. I’m heartbroken. That’s different. ”
“I know.” I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth for a second. “It was about me. My own stuff. It had nothing to do with anything you did or didn’t do. You were everything you needed to be. I just… I built a wall around it a long time ago and I couldn’t figure out how to take it down.”
“Hockey,” she said quietly.
“Yeah. Hockey. And then the habit of it. And then it had been so long that coming out felt like… explaining years of silence I didn’t know how to account for.” I blew out a breath. “None of that is your fault.”
“It’s not about fault.” She let a beat pass. “It’s about my son thinking he had to hide from his own family.”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
“I love you,” she said, plain and simple. “That has never been complicated. Not for a single day.”
My throat tightened. “I know. I love you too.”
“Tell me about him. Evan.”
That surprised me—the directness of it. “Yeah?”
So I did. I told her he was sharp and quiet and noticed everything, that he made me slow down in a way nobody else managed.
That he existed almost entirely outside my world—no hockey, no locker room, someone who’d ever seen my Wikipedia page—and that was exactly what I needed.
That he saw me without any of it and stayed anyway. I talked longer than I meant to.
When I finished, she said, “He sounds like someone worth the trouble.”
“He is.”
“Then hold onto him.” A pause. “Your father wants to talk to you.”
A shuffle. Silence. Then my father cleared his throat. “Nico.”
“Hey, Dad.”
Quiet. My father had never been a man who filled silence for the sake of it.
“I saw the photos,” he said finally.
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Direct. No preamble. That was my father—he’d skip the whole approach and go straight to the heart. “I keep trying to work it out and I can’t. I keep thinking… was there something I did? Something I said?”
“No. Dad, no. It was nothing you did.”
“Then I don’t—” He halted. Started again. “I didn’t know something important about my son. That’s a hard thing to sit with.”
“I know it is.”
“I don’t have a problem with it.” He said it firmly, the way he said things he needed me to actually hear. “I want to be clear about that. Who you are, who you’re with—that’s not the issue. The issue is that you didn’t tell me. That you thought you couldn’t.”
“I didn’t think I couldn’t. I just… wasn’t ready. For a long time, I wasn’t ready, and then it had been so long that I didn’t know how to start the conversation.”
“You start it by starting it.” His voice was gruff. “That’s all. You just start it.”
I almost said I know and stopped myself. “You’re right.”
A long pause.
“I need some time,” he said. Not a rejection—the tone was clear on that. “Not to decide anything. And not from you. I just need time to… adjust to what I didn’t know. To figure out how I missed it for so long.” A beat. “That’s not on you. That’s just me needing time.”
“Take whatever you need.”
“But I want you calling more. Not just when something blows up.” His voice roughened further. “I want my son calling his father.”
“I’ll call more. I promise.”
“Good.” He let a beat go. “This Evan. He’s good to you?”
“Yeah, Dad. He’s good to me.”
“All right.” The roughness hadn’t left his voice, but it had settled. “All right.”
My mother came back on. “We’ll come up next month. Or we’ll see you at your next game in LA or Anaheim. We’ll figure it out in person… all of it.”
“Okay.”
“Te quiero, Nicolás.”
“Te quiero, Mom.”
I hung up and sat there for a while. My eyes were wet. I hadn’t noticed when that started.
My mother had kept a door open for years that I’d never walked through.
My father had sat across from me at dinner tables and holiday visits and summer trips without knowing something fundamental about his son.
Not because he’d given me a reason to hide it, but because I’d been hiding it so long that I’d stopped questioning whether I still needed to.
That was the part that sat heaviest. Not the photos, not the media, not the way the story was already spinning out across the internet with its own momentum. The part that sat heaviest was the years. All the moments I could have chosen differently and didn’t.
I wasn’t going to be able to fix that with a phone call.
It was going to take a while.
I had a lot of ground to make up. With my family, with Evan, with all of it. None of it was going to happen overnight.
But I knew where I was starting. With Evan.