Epilogue #2
“Where he described our relationship as—” I paused. “What was the exact phrase.”
“I believe it was ‘the most inevitable thing that has ever happened in the history of professional hockey,’” Rhett said. “With some additional commentary that I would prefer we not repeat.”
I had read the interview. Twice. I had also, in the privacy of my own home, laughed until I couldn’t breathe, which I would be taking to my grave.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Good,” Rhett said. “Really good.”
My phone buzzed on the desk. I glanced at it.
Brynn: Running 10 late. Colton forgot his wallet again. Love you.
I showed it to Rhett. He shook his head slowly.
“He forgets his wallet every Tuesday,” he said.
“Every Tuesday,” I confirmed.
“You know he does it on purpose.”
“I know.” I set the phone down. “It gives her an excuse to drive them both and then complain about it. Which she loves.” I picked up my coffee. “They’re getting an apartment together.”
Rhett looked at me. “Yeah?”
“She told me last week. They found something in Summerlin. Good neighborhood. Good light.” I paused. “She seemed happy.”
“Is that okay?” he asked quietly.
I thought about the question. About the version of myself that would have answered it two years ago, sitting alone in an arena that felt too big and a house that felt too empty and a life that felt too much like maintenance and not enough like living.
About the version of myself that answered it months ago at the boards of a championship arena with confetti falling and forty thousand people watching.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s okay.”
He reached across the desk and tucked that rogue strand of hair behind my ear.
“Good,” he said.
I swatted his hand away, but not before he caught my fingers and held them for a second. His thumb traced across my knuckles the way it always did. That small, unhurried gesture that he’d been doing since the beginning and that I had stopped pretending not to notice.
“I walked past the trophy this morning,” I said.
“How’d it look?”
“Good.” I turned toward the window, toward the pale March light coming through the glass and falling across the carpet in long gold stripes. “Ryan always said that case was optimistic.”
Rhett was quiet beside me. He always knew when to be quiet. It was one of the ten thousand things about him that had undone me completely.
“He was right,” I said. “It was optimistic.” I looked back at the folder on my desk.
At the arena filling up outside. At the coffee from the good place sitting next to Rhett’s boots on my desk like it belonged there.
“I think I was optimistic too. I just didn’t know what I was being optimistic about yet. ”
“And now?” Rhett asked.
I looked at him.
At those ice blue eyes that had been watching me for three years before I finally let myself look back.
At the disheveled black hair and the freckles across his nose that I hadn’t noticed for the first six months and couldn’t stop noticing now.
At the man who showed up at my door in the middle of the night to change a tire nobody asked him to change and who had been showing up ever since in every way that mattered.
“Now I know exactly what I was being optimistic about,” I said.
He smiled.
Not the boyish grin he used on the rest of the world. The real one. The quiet one he saved for rooms where it was just the two of us and nobody else needed anything from him. The one I was fairly certain nobody else had ever seen.
“Miss C,” he said.
“Rhett.”
“For the record.” He set his coffee down. “I knew what I was being optimistic about three years ago.”
I clicked my tongue. “You were insufferable three years ago.”
“I’m insufferable now.”
“Deeply.”
“And yet.”
“And yet,” I agreed.
We sat like that for a moment. Just the two of us in the early morning quiet of my office with the arena filling up around us and the coffee going cold and the light coming through the blinds in long stripes across the floor.
I looked at my desk. At the Hargrove folder and the crystal award I still hadn’t found a place for and the coffee cup from the good place sitting next to his boots like it belonged there, which it did, which everything about him did, a fact I had stopped arguing with somewhere between the championship and now.
“Hey,” Rhett said.
I looked up.
He wasn’t grinning. He wasn’t doing the charm thing he did with the rest of the world, the easy confident thing that made every room turn toward him without quite knowing why.
He was just looking at me the way he looked at me when it was only us.
Steady and certain and unhurried. Like a man who had already decided and was simply living inside the decision.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Nothing.” He picked up his coffee. “Just hey.”
I looked at him for a second longer than I needed to.
Then I looked back at my clipboard.
But I was smiling.
Down the corridor, I heard the elevator open and the sound of my daughter’s voice carrying toward us, bright and slightly out of breath, already talking before she’d even reached my office door. Behind her, Coach Mercer’s lower register answered something I couldn’t make out.
Rhett glanced toward the doorway. Then back at me. “Ready?”
I straightened my glasses. I picked up my clipboard. I looked at the man sitting on the edge of my desk in my office in the arena I had spent fourteen years building into something worth keeping.
“I’ve been ready,” I said.
And when Brynn came through the door with two coffees and an apology about the wallet and Coach Mercer behind her with the settled look of a man who was exactly where he was supposed to be, I was already smiling.
Which was, all things considered, not a bad way to spend the rest of a life