Chapter 16
Duke
The Zamboni was still on the ice when I walked in.
The rink smelled like cold rubber and the concession stand's first pot of coffee, burned before anyone bought a cup.
The fluorescents overhead buzzed at their usual pitch.
My bag was over my shoulder, my skates already laced loose inside it, and the seven o'clock scrape was running its last pass down the far boards while the Saturday light came through the high windows in pale strips.
The locker room was chaos. Eight kids between five and seven in full gear, helmets too big, pads on backward on at least one of them.
Delaney twins at the bench, fighting over a roll of tape.
Wes trying to walk onto the rubber mat with his blade guards still on.
Sofia sitting on the floor with one skate laced and the other in her lap, staring at it like it had personally wronged her.
"Guards off before you hit the mat, Wes."
"I know."
"Do you?"
He looked down. He didn't know.
I moved through the room the same way I moved through it every Saturday.
Chinstrap on Finn, who was seven and had no natural sense of self-preservation.
Laces retied on Sofia, who had the determination but not the fingers for a proper knot.
The Delaney twins were fighting over a roll of tape—I confiscated it, handed them each a stick, and moved on.
I knew their names, their parents, their weak spots, and which one of them was going to cry first if practice ran long.
Four years of Saturdays had given me that.
Practice was short drills on center ice.
Crossovers at the blue line, most of them turning into controlled crashes.
A passing drill that was more suggestion than execution.
Sofia got her edges under her for three full strides before she went down, and I told her that was the best three strides I'd seen all season, and she got up with her chin set like she was going to do four.
Finn skated into the boards twice. Wes figured out how to stop without hitting anything, which for Wes was a breakthrough.
I blew the whistle, ran the drill, and reset the cones.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I wasn't supposed to check it during practice. I checked it because I was a parent now, and parents check their phones.
A photo from Audrey. Taken from the bleachers.
Nova in the carrier, wrapped in the gray-and-white blanket my mother knit, the fox onesie underneath. Her eyes were open. She was staring at the ice with the focused expression of a two-month-old who had opinions about what she was seeing and no words for them yet.
I looked up. Audrey was in the bleachers, three rows up, near the corner. She gave me a small wave. I gave her one back. Finn skated into the boards, and I was back in practice mode.
But the thing landed while I was resetting the cones.
My daughter was in the bleachers. In four years, I never once looked up at those seats and saw someone who was mine.
The seats were for parents. I was Coach D.
Now there was a baby in the third row who had my dimple, and the woman holding her was a woman I'd spent almost a year falling for.
The two of them were watching me teach a seven-year-old how to stop.
I ran the next drill.
Practice ended. The kids hit the bench, parents started down from the bleachers, and the locker room was about to become the usual post-practice disaster. I was pulling cones off the ice when Finn pointed at the bleachers with his stick.
"Coach D. Is that baby yours?"
I looked up. Audrey was coming down the steps with the carrier in her hand, Nova visible under the blanket.
"Yeah," I said. "That's my daughter."
I said it without thinking about it. Plain. Owned. Finn nodded like that was reasonable information and skated off toward his mother.
I stood at center ice with my stick across my knees, and the interior caught up a beat late. That was the first time I'd said it outside the firehouse, outside my family. And the saying was the easiest thing I'd done all week. No performance in it. No charm. Just the fact, and the fact was mine.
I looked up at the bleachers. Audrey was at the bottom of the steps, the carrier in her hand. She'd heard me. I could see it on her face, the small thing her mouth was doing that wasn't quite a smile.
I skated to the boards. "Hi."
"Hi."
Nova in the carrier between us, eyes still on the ice, waiting for the practice to start again.
We had lunch on Main Street with Nova in the carrier on a third chair between us, both of us eating burgers, and then drove to my place with Audrey in the passenger seat and Nova in the back.
She'd been here twice now. She pulled her boots off at the door this time without thinking, which I noticed and didn't say anything about.
The house was the same—the small kitchen, the framed firehouse photo, the coffeemaker on the counter—except for the second bedroom, where a portable crib sat in the corner that hadn't been there last time.
We put Nova down together, her hand on the baby's chest until the breathing steadied, the monitor clicked on, and the door pulled partially shut.
Audrey came out of the nursery, and I was in the kitchen pouring water from the Brita when she crossed the room, took the glass out of my hand, set it on the counter, and kissed me.
I kissed her back with both hands at her waist, and the afternoon opened up around us.
This was the part I hadn't expected. Not the sex—I'd expected the sex, or at least, I'd wanted it badly enough that expecting and wanting had blurred into the same thing. What I hadn't expected was that it would keep getting better.
A decade of casual had taught me that the first time with someone was the sharpest version, and everything after dulled by a degree.
That was the logic underneath the goodbyes.
The first night carried the charge. The second carried less.
By the third, you were maintaining something instead of discovering it.
Audrey had blown that logic apart in about a week.
This time was different from the first.
The first time had been the relief of finally, the months of holding back giving way all at once.
This time had daylight in it. I could see her properly, the freckle below her collarbone I'd found in the dark and was finding again now in the afternoon light coming through the bedroom window.
I was paying attention in a different way.
Not the urgency of the first time, but something slower, more deliberate—the beginning of learning where she was sensitive, what she wanted, the specific sound she made when I found the right angle and stayed there.
Except the rig didn't pull my hair or laugh against my mouth when I did something she wasn't expecting.
She pulled her sweater over her head in my kitchen, and I looked at her in the daylight.
She'd been taking care of herself the last couple of weeks.
The color was back in her face, her hair washed and down around her shoulders, the mascara she'd started wearing again—the small signals of a woman climbing out of the fog and back into herself.
She looked like herself again—Sports Illustrated beautiful, sharp-jawed, gray-eyed—except now, I knew what she looked like at three in the morning with spit-up on her shoulder, and I wanted both versions with the same force, and that was new for me too.
We made it to the bedroom. She pushed me onto the bed, climbed over me, and I pulled her down to me. She kissed me with her hands braced on my chest, her hair falling around both of us.
She lowered herself onto me, and the room went narrow and warm.
Slow. The afternoon through the window. Her above me, her hands on my chest, her eyes closed.
I watched her face and felt something I'd never felt with anyone before her—the privilege of being the person she came back to.
Not a Tuesday night. Not an easy goodbye.
The same woman, in my bed, choosing me again, and the choosing making it better than any first time.
She opened her eyes and caught me watching. She didn't look away. Neither did I. She moved, and I moved with her, and for a while, the only sound in the house was the two of us breathing.
Afterwards, we were on my bed with the afternoon light on the ceiling, her head on my chest, Nova still asleep in the next room.
Only the second time, and already it had a morning at an ice rink underneath it, and a baby in the next room, and daylight showing me everything the dark had only suggested.
My hand was in her hair. My eyes on the ceiling. Audrey not yet asleep, but not far from it.
"Audrey."
A small sound. "Mm?"
I took a beat. I'd been carrying this for weeks, since the pediatrician's office.
The intake nurse had handed me the clipboard and asked for the father's information, and I'd filled it in without thinking—name, birthday, address, phone number—because of course I had, because I was her father.
But sitting there with the pen in my hand, it had occurred to me for the first time that nobody had asked me for any of this before.
Not at the hospital. Not on any form. I was the father in every room that mattered, and I'd never once been asked to put my name anywhere official.
I understood why. I understood the morning at the hospital, the deal we made, the fear she'd been carrying since before Nova was born.
“I don't think I'm on Nova's birth certificate,” I said. “I figured that out a few weeks ago. I didn't want to push.”
She went still against my chest. Her hand stopped moving.
"I'm not angry," I said. "I get why it's blank. But I want to ask you if we can change it."
The room went quiet. The monitor hummed. The afternoon held still.
Audrey didn't answer right away. I didn't push. I kept my hand in her hair and let the silence sit, because the silence was hers, and the answer was hers, and I wasn’t going to fill the space where she was deciding.
The ask had been small in the room and enormous in my head.
I'd been her daughter's father for ten weeks.
I changed the diapers, walked the floors at three in the morning, learned the cries, brought the coffee, and held the baby while her mother slept.
I was the father in every room that mattered.
I was asking to be the father in the one room I wasn't.
Her shoulder rose under my hand. She let out a breath, long and controlled, and I registered it as relief. The breath of a woman who'd been holding something and was setting it down.
"Yeah," she said.
I took a beat. Careful, the same careful I used when I asked to be Nova’s father at the hospital. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
I didn't say anything else. I turned my face into her hair and closed my eyes. The afternoon light sat on the ceiling above us, the crib monitor hummed in the next room, and the thing we'd just decided was in the room with us, quiet and enormous.
Nova stirred. Audrey got up. She pulled on my gray Hartsdale Fire T-shirt, which hit her mid-thigh, and went to the next room.
I stayed on the bed for a beat, listening to her voice through the wall, the soft sounds she made when she picked Nova up. She'd pulled the shirt on without asking, like it was already hers, and I'd watched her walk out of my bedroom barefoot on my floor with my daughter in the next room.
I felt like the luckiest man who had ever lived.
I didn't know how else to say it. A year ago, my life was Tuesday nights and easy goodbyes.
Now, Audrey Callahan was wearing my shirt in my house on a Saturday afternoon, the baby she'd carried for nine months was sleeping in a crib I bought, and I was lying in sheets that smelled like both of us, thinking I didn't deserve this and I was never letting it go at the same time.
Mid-week. Halsey called over, from the stove, without turning around: "So, Rhodes. Whatever happened with that Nepal thing? Weren't you supposed to hear back?"
I took a sip of coffee. "Still waiting. Haven't heard anything definitive."
That wasn't an answer. The slot was as good as mine if I wanted it.
I'd known that since the email came in, saying I was the last one waiting.
What I hadn't told anyone was what I'd thought when I read it—not the summit, not the altitude, not the team.
I'd thought about Nova being four months old by the departure date, and the part where babies started laughing at things on purpose, and whether I was going to be in the room for it or not.
I'd been running the expedition dates against her milestones for weeks, the same way I used to run them against my training log, and the math kept coming out the same way.
The mountain had been getting smaller in my head.
The house with the portable crib and the coffee I brought every morning had been getting larger. I hadn't told anyone that either.
Halsey nodded. Micah said something about the baby. The conversation moved on.
Across the bay, Easton stopped what he was doing at the engine. He looked at me through the open door. He didn't say anything. He held the look for a beat, then went back to the rig.
I clocked it. Easton knew I'd been on the waitlist for over a year. He knew the timeline. He could do the math on whether I'd heard back, and the math didn't add up to still waiting. He didn't push. He just looked, and the look said I see what you're doing.
Easton walked past on his way to the locker. His hand came down on my shoulder, one solid tap, and kept moving.
I nodded. Didn't look up.
The crew rhythm continued. Halsey at the stove.
Lou through the kitchen with his clipboard and his coffee.
Micah telling a story about a girl he met at the hardware store that nobody had asked to hear.
I laughed at the right beat because laughing at the right beat was what I did.
The email sat in my inbox. I'd get to it when I got to it. I had somewhere to be after shift.