Chapter 3
Three
Everly
The way my heart is racing by the time I slip inside, you’d think I was running from death. No such luck.
I throw the lock, the bolt sliding into place with a comforting tap. I let out a shaking breath and press my forehead against the door, then stand there breathing for a whole minute while I try to convince my heart that we are not, in fact, being chased by a bear.
Only by Beckett Benson.
When my heart finally settles, I turn to face the empty foyer. My muscles ache, my feet ache, my head aches. I reach up, my fingers threading through the dark hair, and I let out a heavy breath.
Then I take off the wig.
The bobby pins come out first—eight of them, jabbed into the wig cap.
Probably way more than necessary, but after that dream where my wig falls off mid acceptance speech and is carried off by a rare gust of indoor wind to land on top of the award-ceremony cake, I don’t take any chances.
The cap peels off. And then it’s just my hair—auburn red, feral, a full mutiny of curls that have been smashed flat for seven hours and are now erupting in every direction with righteous fury.
I let out a sigh and run my fingers through my hair, massaging my scalp, hushing the fury.
I catch my reflection in the hallway mirror. There she is. The real one. Freckles across the nose. Green eyes that my mother always called olive and my optometrist always called slightly astigmatic. No dark bob. No E.J. Hartley mask. Just Everly.
The house is dark and quiet and too big, the way it always is when I come home late.
I bought this Tudor two years ago with the advance from my hockey trilogy and the accumulated royalties from five E.J.
Hartley thrillers. White stucco, swooping slate roof, tall windows that look out on the Lake District.
Three bedrooms for one person. A kitchen with marble countertops and a six-burner range I use exclusively for reheating pad thai.
Built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves framing a stonework fireplace I’ve never learned how to use.
It’s a beautiful house. It’s a lonely house. Both things are true at the same time.
I go upstairs, peel off the gala dress, toss it on the floor of my walk-in closet—a problem for Tomorrow Everly—and I pull on pajamas. The good ones. A pair of well-worn flannel pants and a gray, oversized, wearable blanket hoodie.
I go back downstairs. Heat some water for tea and click on the TV. My Netflix opens straight to Gilmore Girls. Season three.
I drop a tea bag into my mug and settle onto the couch, tucking my legs up under me.
I hate this show. And I love this show.
Lorelai drives me nuts with her choices. And the thing with her and Luke? Sometimes I just want to scream at the TV.
And Rory with Dean. Don’t get me started on Dean.
But then there’s Jess…I always come back to poor, misunderstood Jess.
I’m three minutes into the episode and not absorbing a single syllable because my brain is running a highlight reel of the last four hours on loop—the elevator, the dark, his voice, the gala, the tray, the books, the box exploding, his laugh, my laugh, the stomach growl, his face when I said no, his voice going flat and dead when he said Sure, whatever you want.
Finally, I mute the show, toss the remote aside, and pick up my phone.
Julia answers on the second ring. “It’s midnight.”
My eyes dart to the clock in the kitchen, and I wince. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”
“Eh. It’s fine. I was still midnight doomscrolling. Are you okay?”
“Physically, I’m fine—well, my feet are sore from wearing heels all day, and my hand is tired from signing books, and my hands are chapped from touching so much paper, but yeah, I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh. And emotionally?”
“Emotionally, I have been backed over by a pickup truck, and the truck circled back and ran me over again, and then the driver got out and offered me a casserole.”
Silence. Then, “All right, I’m up. I’m making tea. Start from the beginning.”
Julia McMillan has been my best friend since freshman year at the University of Minnesota, when we were assigned to the same dorm floor and bonded over a shared obsession with true-crime podcasts and a shared inability to cook anything more complex than toast. She’s a family law attorney in St. Paul now.
She has the emotional range of a woman who has watched humanity torch itself at close range and still believes in love—theoretically—and she is one of exactly three people on earth who know that Everly Hart is Sutton Blake.
“So, I had that gala tonight.”
“The hockey gala.” Her spoon clinks against ceramic. “The one you told me you would attend, quote, over your dead body?”
“My dad guilted me. He used the voice.”
“The proud-dad voice.”
“The proud-dad voice. Yes.”
I can practically see her rolling her eyes at me. I brace myself for a talk about personal boundaries, but apparently, she’s letting it go tonight. “So…you went to the gala, and…?”
“And I got stuck in an elevator.” The rest of the story simply flows from my brain, churning out words faster than I can process them. I tell her about the elevator. The dark. The stranger, his confession, and the very life-changing realization that the man in the dark was none other than B.B.
“Hold on.” Julia’s voice drops. “B.B.—the guy from the letters?”
“Yes.”
“The guy with the long, heartfelt letters?”
“That’s the one.”
“The guy—”
“Julia. Yes. Him.”
“Oofda.”
“Oh, it gets worse.”
“How does it get worse?”
“Because then the power flickered on for just a second, and the lights flashed, and—you are not going to believe who it was.”
A long pause, and then, “So tell me!”
“It was Beckett Benson.”
Silence. I can hear when Julia’s spoon stops stirring.
“I’m going to need you to say that again,” she says slowly.
“Beckett. Benson. Blue Ox defenseman. Number forty-seven. The pride of Minnesota hockey.” I swallow. “My father’s star player.”
“Your father’s—the kid your dad—”
“The kid my dad coached instead of coming home to save his marriage. Yes.”
“The one who—whatever happened between you two?” Julia asks, then quickly adds, “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”
The question catches me off guard. In all the years we’ve been friends, in all the times I’ve spoken about my father or my parents’ divorce, I suppose I never told her about what happened with Beckett, other than that he’s the one my father chose when push came to shove.
I shift the mug in my hands, soaking in the warmth and fighting off the icy memories that come with Beckett Benson. “No, it’s okay.”
I take a sip of my tea and let my memory surface.
“You know about my parents’ divorce, how my dad was working long hours, staying late at practice, going in early, how it drove a wedge between him and my mom. And you know that Beckett was the kid he was spending all that extra time with, giving him that hands-on teaching.”
My thumb runs the rim of my mug. “Anyway…it was like that for a few years before my mom had had enough. When I was in sixth grade, I came home from school to find our bags packed on the front porch, and I knew it was over, but I wasn’t ready.
” I shrug as though she can see it. “So I ran. The rink wasn’t far from the house—I’d walked there a million times on my own.
” My voice turns raspy as I think about little Everly, hiding behind that Zamboni, desperately holding her world together.
“I was there about ten minutes before Beckett showed up for his one-on-one practice. He found me hiding out, sobbing into my mittens. And I just…I let him have it. I told him it was his fault. That he didn’t have a dad, but it wasn’t fair for him to take mine.”
I pull in a breath, blinking away the memory of Beckett’s face, harsh and angry in my watery vision.
“I’ll never forget what he said.” I swallow hard. “He said, ‘It’s not my fault your dad likes me better. I actually play hockey. You just sit in the stands.’”
“Oh my goodness,” Julia whispers. “Evie, I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”
“Yeah…and that’s not the end of it.” I exhale a heavy breath, trying my best to shake it off.
“I saw him again, two years later. I lived mostly with my mom, but I was staying with my dad for the week. I never visited him at practice, as a general rule—not after the divorce—but I was submitting a story to a young writers contest. I needed money for the entrance fee, and I was running up against the deadline. So I put aside my rules and visited him at the rink to ask him for a check.”
I close my eyes, and I can still see it. Vinyl banners dangling from the walls. The cold scent of chemicals. The sun pouring over the ice from the horizontal windows at the top of the arena. The whole team, decked out in blue, swarmed the ice like sharks.
“I walked in during the middle of practice, and it took all of two seconds for Beckett to spot me. He sprayed ice in my face. And then he told me to ‘stick to the stands.’ I was…humiliated. I didn’t know what to do, so I just ran.
Stowed away in the hall and waited for practice to end.
A few minutes later, Beckett showed up and found me with mascara running down my face and my hands shaking.
He said, ‘I got benched. Happy now?’” My fingers tighten around my mug.
“Like I was the problem. Like my pain was an inconvenience to his ice time.”
I take a breath.
“I know he was only fourteen. I know kids are terrible. But Julia, I can still hear him saying it. I hear it every time someone says his name.”
“And this is your pen pal.”
“This is my pen pal.” The man whose words follow me for days, make me feel like someone important. “I don’t understand. I really don’t.”
“You never put the pieces together?” Julia asks. “Nothing in those letters made you stop and wonder? He signs it B.B., for Pete’s sake.”