27. April 3, Sunday #2
“I pieced some things together.” His voice softened. “And Ty said something after the game about overhearing Ashley and Babs earlier when they gave him the drawing to give to me. I think he thought I already knew.”
Zoey swallowed hard. “I was going to tell you. I wanted to tell you last night. I just…” Her fingers tightened around the water bottle until the plastic crinkled.
“I didn’t want to get excited too soon if it fell apart.
And then everything happened with Mitch, and Christian, and I was going to talk to you tonight. ”
“I know.”
The gentleness of that almost did her in.
“You are meant to be a mother. I see it every time you look at him. Or at any kid, really.”
His mouth twitched, then fell.
“And when you look at me.”
Tears burned behind her eyes.
“You see a future.” He paused. “You deserve that. You deserve someone who can walk into it with you.”
“I see you in it,” she said. “Not some hypothetical guy. You.”
His eyes closed. “I can’t be that guy.”
The air left her lungs. “Don’t say that.”
“I have to.” He opened his eyes again, bright with grief. “Jayden needs a family now. Not a man who has to be talked into believing he will not ruin one.”
“So what?” she demanded, voice roughening. “You just get to walk away? Decide for both of us that you know what’s best?”
“Zoey—”
“Don’t.” Hurt flared hot and clean. “You do not get to make yourself the noble one here. You don’t get to dump all of this on the altar of your captaincy and pretend that means you’re brave.”
His shoulders sagged.
“I’m not trying to be brave,” he said. “I’m trying not to be selfish.”
“You are being selfish,” she shot back. “You’re deciding that your fear matters more than my choice. More than what I want. More than what we could have.”
He looked at her like she was asking him to jump without seeing the ground.
“Would you really choose that?” he asked hoarsely. “The waiting room. The scans. The possibility of me not coming back the same? Would you choose that for yourself? For a child?”
“Yes,” she insisted, the truth tearing straight out of her. “Because I already did.”
Silence.
For one terrible heartbeat, he looked like he might break open.
Then something in him locked.
“I won’t ask you to,” he said, voice quiet and absolute. “I won’t ask him to. I am not worth that risk.”
Tears burned hot now.
“You don’t get to decide you’re too broken for love,” she sniffed, “and then punish me for believing otherwise.”
“I am not punishing you,” he argued, sounding like he believed it. “I’m trying to keep you from getting hurt more than you already have.”
“You’re failing.”
Silence stretched, sharp and brittle.
He folded the drawing carefully along its existing creases until it was a neat square.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Then he stepped back.
He looked at her once more, something fierce and wrecked in his eyes, then turned and walked toward the parking garage, Jayden’s picture clenched in his hand like a treasure he didn’t deserve but couldn’t let go.
The sound of his footsteps faded.
The echo stayed.
Zoey shut her eyes for one second, just to keep the hallway from tilting.
She didn’t know how long she stood there.
The sharp click of heels on tile made her eyes open.
Nina came around the corner, expression cool, lipstick perfect.
Of course it’s her.
Her gaze flicked from Zoey’s face to the empty hallway where Ilya had disappeared.
“That,” Nina said, “was quite a conversation to have in a public area.”
Zoey’s spine locked. “We were just—”
“Talking about your relationship with the team captain?” Nina’s brows lifted. “During a playoff push? While one player is in the hospital? Excellent instincts.”
Shame and anger surged at once. “I’m allowed to have a personal life.”
“You’re allowed a personal life,” Nina clarified crisply. “You are not allowed to become an HR nightmare in community relations, with vulnerable children attached to your programming, while sleeping with the face of the franchise.”
Heat crawled up Zoey’s neck. “This is not a gossip magazine.”
“No, it’s worse. It’s a professional organization where perception matters, whether we like it or not. And from where I’m standing, the woman running our most sensitive outreach work has become part of a locker-room instability issue.”
“I am not a liability.”
Nina’s mouth tightened.
“I didn’t hear every word,” she began. “But I heard enough. He thinks this is affecting him. Maybe he’s wrong.
Maybe he’s spiraling. Maybe tonight scared the hell out of him and he’s blaming the closest soft thing he can reach.
But management won’t parse that much nuance if this gets ugly.
Neither will Peyton Knowles if she gets wind and wants to run a hot story. ”
The words hit too close to where Zoey already hurt.
Nina exhaled through her nose, some of the bite flattening into cold fatigue. “Do you know how hard I worked to make this department matter here? To get management to treat community work as more than decorative PR?”
Zoey said nothing.
“They will cut anything that looks like a distraction to the product on the ice,” Nina said. “And if every beat writer in this city starts sniffing around a story about instability in the room, this becomes very easy to sacrifice.”
The threat was clear enough without being named.
“If you care about this job,” Nina continued, “and if you care about those kids, you need to decide very quickly what you’re willing to lose.”
Zoey’s throat worked. “Are you threatening to fire me?”
“I’m telling you choices have consequences.”
Something bitter flashed in Nina’s eyes.
“I can’t believe I used to admire you,” she said quietly.
Zoey flinched despite herself.
“I thought you were the one who wouldn’t shrink herself for a man,” Nina said. “I thought maybe you’d finally found your way back to that woman.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Maybe not.” Nina’s gaze dragged over her, cool and cutting. “But from the outside? It looks painfully familiar.”
Then she turned and walked away, heel clicks sharp in the half-lit hall.
Zoey stood there with the aftertaste of heartache, disappointment, and dread scraping down her spine.
Eventually, muscle memory kicked in.
She checked her phone.
No new update on Christian.
Three missed texts, none from Ilya.
Then she started walking. Through staff corridors that usually felt like hers. Past clinic flyers she’d designed. Past little signs she’d laminated. Past the vending nook where she and Ilya once shared a grin over a jammed machine.
Everything looked the same.
None of it felt familiar.
She stopped in her office long enough to stare blankly at her desk, then locked up and headed for the parking garage.
By then it was mostly empty. A few scattered cars sat under fluorescent pools of light. The hum of the building’s mechanical systems sounded too loud in the near silence.
She spotted her little car halfway down the row and fixed on it like a finish line.
For a second, she let herself picture what she’d originally planned for tonight: a hot shower, pajamas, maybe a chat with Kayla—if she was home—to debrief, then later curled up under the covers waiting for a text from Ilya that would have her smiling as she fell asleep.
Instead, she had Christian’s vacant stare, Ilya’s I can’t, Nina’s threat, and an ache in her chest where hope had been.
A soft, broken whine cut through the garage.
She froze.
It came again—thin, reedy, pained.
Not a car.
Not a person.
Something near the front of her car, where shadow pooled between her bumper and the next vehicle.