Chapter 18
Eighteen
Beckett
The manuscript sits burning a hole in my passenger seat. I’m in the Blue Ox parking lot, engine running. The flickering streetlights pour through my windshield, providing enough light to read it.
I’m not ready. After everything that’s happened this past week, I’m not ready for one more thing. To read Sutton Blake and know it’s Everly. To hear her voice in the words. To see the way she views me.
I’ve always been a villain in her story.
And when you’ve finished—when you’ve read what that woman wrote about the man in those letters—come back and tell me she was exploiting you.
That could mean anything.
I put the car in Drive. I don’t go home.
The porch light is on. It always is. Maybe that’s a universal fact about mothers—that they never really stop leaving the light on.
I knock. She’ll be up—my mom doesn’t sleep before eleven.
Her evenings are typically occupied by mystery novels in the living room chair, a warm cup of tea, and the television on mute.
It’s always been that way, even when I was a kid.
She’d tuck me in for the night, then head down for her nightly novel.
Sometimes, on a rare night, she’d let me stay up with her, watch my dad play on the little TV.
It never occurred to me she might have been waiting for that call.
The door opens. Light pours over my mother’s shoulder, reading glasses on the top of her head. She wraps her cardigan around herself—always a cardigan, always some shade of blue, the uniform of a woman who has spent a lifetime keeping warm on a budget.
She takes one look at me and knows. She always knows. Whatever frequency distress broadcasts on, my mom has the antenna permanently tuned.
“Come on in, sweetie.”
Not What’s wrong? Not It’s late. Just the door opening. The unconditional availability of a mother who’s watched her son come home wrecked more than once. She knows the drill—probably from way back when she married my dad.
The house smells like lavender dish soap mixed with mom’s tea. Clean and warm. I settle onto the sofa. The TV is muted on HGTV, reruns of that old curb-appeal show with the girl with a funny name. Something Decker.
“Tea?” Mom asks, already moving toward the kitchen. Not waiting for the answer, because the answer is always yes and the question is a formality. This is the ritual. I come home broken, she makes tea.
She sets the mug in front of me and sits. She settles in, her eyes on the screen, giving me time.
Waiting.
“So…Coach told me something tonight. About Dad.”
She pulls her gaze from the TV, lips parted in surprise. “What did he tell you?”
I reach forward to pick up my mug, the heat warming my palms. “He told me Dad used to call you after every game.”
She opens. Slightly. The way a door opens when the lock turns. “He did,” she says softly.
“After every game?”
“Every single one. Win or lose. He’d come off the ice with his knuckles swollen, and the first thing—before the shower, before the ice—he’d find that phone.
” She holds the mug without drinking. “And he’d say the same thing.
‘I’m coming home. Tell Beck I love him.’” She looks down at her tea with a wistful expression.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
My mother’s gaze pulls back to me, head tilting slightly.
“I told you. But you were young. Most nights, by the time the call came through, you were long asleep. But I’d still find you.
I’d crawl onto the bed, or sit on the floor, wherever I could be close to you, and I’d whisper ‘Daddy called. He loves you.’ And if you were awake, you’d smile that cheeky grin—your dad’s smile—and you’d say ‘I love him back.’”
I try to imagine it, me at seven or eight, waking up to the promise that my dad was on his way. I don’t remember those nights. I wish I did.
“After the accident”—her voice snags for one split second on the word, the only concession to twenty-three years of grief—“I wanted to keep the tradition alive. You were eight, and you had all this grief. And you didn’t want me climbing onto your bed at night to tell you how much your dad loved you.
You wanted to do something about it. To take all that grief and turn it into something.
I think it was your little eight-year-old way of trying to provide… for me.”
She smiles. It’s sad. “Maybe I shouldn’t have let you push yourself so hard. But I thought—if the ice could hold you, I could let it carry what I was too exhausted to carry alone.”
“Mom—”
“But just because I stopped telling you, didn’t mean it was no longer true. Your dad, he loved you, Beckett.” She reaches across the table. “The night you were born…”
She pauses. Choosing to open a door she’s kept closed.
“Your father held you. Four hours old. This big man. Fierce. Terrifying on the ice. And you reduced him to tears.” Her eyes are bright. “And he said, ‘If all I ever get is this moment with him right here, it will have been enough.’”
The words enter me and find the hollow and fill it with something that is not anger and not shame.
And maybe not grief either—at least, not the icy kind that keeps you cold, makes you keep people at arm’s length because the pain is too much to share.
No. The kind that settles in your heart with a finality that sets things right.
“He’d be proud of the man you are,” Mom says. “On the ice and off.”
The moment holds, fills the room like a crackling fire. I smile back at her. “Thanks, Mom.”
We settle back into the quiet, sipping our tea and watching someone break down a garden retaining wall, unearthing something new behind it.
Minutes pass before my mom speaks up again. “So, are you going to tell me about what happened with Everly?”
I glance at her, a kid who thought he got away with detention without his mom finding out. Apparently not.
“I tried to call. Twice. You didn’t pick up.
Then it was all over the news. I had half the hospital nurses chasing me down during my shifts this week to tell me how they saw my brave boy on the news.
” She takes a sip, waiting for my side of the story.
Waiting for me to explain why I said what I did about Everly.
“I made a mistake.”
“You did.” She doesn’t pull her punches this time. “So why did you say it?”
I let out a heavy breath, hands cupping my tea, which I still haven’t touched. “Rick told me it could jeopardize my contract if it looked like there was something going on between Everly and me.”
Mom looks at me, one brow raised in that mischievous way. “Well, was there?”
My gaze lifts. Holds. “Yes.”
Mom’s lips press together, attempting to stifle a smile and failing miserably. She reaches out and takes my hand, gives it a squeeze. “You know what I used to pray?” she says. “After your father died. Every night. For years.”
“What?”
“I prayed for you to stop.” Her eyes find the photos on the mantel—old pictures of me, the timeline of Beckett Benson.
She goes on without looking at me. “Not that you’d stop skating—I never prayed for that.
But that you’d stop carrying the weight of your father’s death on your eight-year-old shoulders.
Because it never got any lighter. As you grew, the weight did too.
It got heavier as you got stronger, always exactly as much as you could bear and never light enough to set down. ”
Her hand tightens on mine.
“There’s a verse,” she says. “In Matthew. ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’” She says it like the verse lives in her body, in the muscle and bone.
“I’ve been humming it over dishes since you were nine years old.
The hymn arrangement. You probably heard it a thousand times and thought it was just Mom being Mom. Background music.”
I did. I thought exactly that.
“All those hymns I used to sing, they are prayers. And that one’s been my prayer for you for twenty-three years. Because I’ve been watching you carry a load that was never yours to carry. Skating laps at midnight. Training until your body breaks. Always fighting for the win.”
She lets go of my hand, lifting it to brush my cheek. A gesture long forgotten from my childhood.
“Rest isn’t quitting, Beckett. Rest isn’t weakness.
Rest isn’t dishonoring your father or wasting my sacrifice or abandoning the sport.
” Her voice is steady and fierce and gentle all at once—she would have made a great hockey coach with that voice.
“Rest is trusting that you don’t have to be enough because God is. ”
She gives me a small smile.
And I think I finally understand.
I’ve been weary. I’ve been burdened. I’ve been carrying a dead man’s imagined expectations for so long I mistook the exhaustion for purpose.
Come to me, all you who are weary.
I am weary. I’m so weary that the weariness has its own weariness. Weary of the performance and the press conferences and the blue line and the constant feeling that I’ll only ever be seen for the worst versions of myself. For my mistakes.
And I will give you rest.
“I don’t know how.” It’s the truest thing I’ve said all week. “I don’t know how to rest, Mom. I don’t know how to stop.”
She smiles. “Rest isn’t something you do, Beckett.
It’s something you receive the way you receive grace.
The way you receive love. By stopping long enough to let it find you.
” She stands, picking up our mugs, hers empty, mine simply forgotten.
She starts toward the kitchen and stops, turning back.
“I’d start with prayer. That’s always a good place to begin. ”
She disappears into the kitchen, leaving me to the quiet.
Start with prayer.