Chapter 32
thirty-two
ROWAN
The room turns before I understand why.
I’m stuck along the back wall with my father, half-listening to one of his stories and another of his plans that I stopped caring about somewhere around the third name — which scouts called, which didn’t, and which phone call fixes it.
He’s standing close, shoulder turned out to the room so it reads as a private father-son moment. My mother sent her apologies again — a headache, the kind I stopped believing years ago, the kind that arrives precisely when a room like this one beckons.
I’ve been nodding for forty minutes. That part isn’t new. What’s new is that I’m not selling him the certainty he wants, not running the calculations a half-step ahead of him to anticipate what he wants, the way I’ve done since I was twelve.
But then the noise changes, and I look up over my father’s shoulder.
Sloane is near the end of the bar with Ivy beside her and Patrick Cross planted directly in front of her. She’s holding herself proud, chin up and shoulders set, and beneath all that tension is something I’ve never once seen her let a room see.
Fury.
Everything in me goes still.
I don’t excuse myself or finish the conversation. My father is mid-sentence, something about how a man who lets a window close spends the rest of his life looking through someone else’s glass, and I walk away from him.
Because I don’t care how that sentence ends.
My legs eat the distance, and the whole way over there, a pressure under my sternum tightens, because I know exactly what my body wants to do. Get between them. Take her by the elbow and move her behind me. Stand in front of her and take the storm head-on.
But I don’t do that.
I get to her side just as Patrick says something low and furious — the tail of whatever he’s hissing now that she’s turned the whole room on him — and I stop, put my hand on the small of her back, and wait. That’s it. That’s all I do.
Her spine straightens under my palm, and the shaking — the furious kind, not the scared kind — steadies by a degree. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t have to. She knows it’s me, and she knows the hand is going to stay exactly where it is.
Patrick’s eyes cut to me. “Hale, good. Maybe you can talk some sense into your girl—”
“No,” I say. “I’m not going to do that.”
He scoffs. “Then you should think about your future. People are watching.”
“I know they are.”
“The calls have already been made, Rowan. Your stock is not what it was in October, and the reason is not your play — it’s the company you keep and the noise that comes with it.”
“I know,” I say. “But I’m not chasing it.”
He stops.
“The league.” I keep my voice even, but I let it carry the way hers did, because I want it heard thirty feet back, where my father is standing. “Not on your timeline.”
“That’s preposterous,” Patrick spits. “Nobody has—”
“I don’t care what others do. I’m staying at Halden, with Sloane, and I’m finishing my degree and captaining this team. After that, it’ll be my call, on my timeline, and it might be the league or it might not. But it will be my decision, and nothing I decide will be because of you or anyone else.”
“You’re making a mess, Rowan,” Patrick says, low and ugly now, the polish gone. “You’re throwing it all away over a girl.”
“Sometimes a little mess is good,” I say. “The leverage you’re trying to use only works if I want the thing more than I want anything else, and I’ve decided I don’t.”
He scoffs.
I tilt my chin half an inch toward Sloane. “And her complaint against your son is true. I’m behind it, all the way, and I am not going to be the reason she’s quiet about it anymore.”
Then I take my hand off her back, and I step six inches to her side.
Sloane looks at me. Her eyes are bright and wet and furious and steady, and the look lasts maybe a second before she turns it back on him — and I feel both things at once: how grateful she is and how much she doesn’t need me to handle this.
That’s when Mason appears at his father’s shoulder.
He’s drawn over by the noise, like everyone else. Now he’s here as the dutiful son, the family investment on display in a suit that matches his father’s, the boy a man was willing to ruin others to protect.
He has the smirk he always has, but his eyes give it away. They’re moving fast, reading the room, reading his father, reading her. And I see how much the boy imitates the father. I’m not the only one who notices.
Sloane looks at the two of them and scoffs. “Mason, you took something that happened to me and dug it back up because you wanted to hurt me and someone else I love.”
Mason doesn’t move, but the smirk dims.
Then she does something I don’t think any of us sees coming. She drops the anger half a register, and she looks back at Mason, the way you’d look at someone you’re a little sorry for, like she’s just figured it all out.
“You learned it from him, and he does it to you too,” she says, almost gently. “You do know that, right?”
Mason swallows, and he glances at his father, one flick, fast and involuntary, and there’s something young in it, something that hasn’t been fully trained out of him yet. Then he looks at the floor, because he knows the whole room is watching.
And Patrick’s smirk — the one he wears exactly like his son does, or his son wears exactly like him — finally falls. There’s no slur, no shout, just a father and a son standing in a ring of people with nowhere to hide.
Patrick’s eyes move from me to Sloane and back. “We’ll see how you both feel when the hormones wear off and you realize what you’ve thrown away. I’ve got some calls to make.”
Then he puts a hand on Mason’s shoulder and steers him back toward the doors, and the crowd opens to let them through. Then they’re gone, and the noise comes back, and the gala goes on.
“Thank you,” Sloane says, turning to me. “For not coming in over the top.”
“I wanted to,” I tell her, because she should know it’s true. “Every second.”
“I know.” She’s still shaking, a little. “That’s the whole point, Rowan.”
And it’s that — her saying it, the small wrecked honesty of it — that finally does it.
All the carrying just lets go, and I don’t reach to catch it.
“You’re sure, though?” she says, lower now, just for me. “I don’t want to be the thing you gave your future up for.”
“Maybe I gave something up.” I make her look at me.
“Maybe some of those calls already landed and the path to the league is harder now than it was, or gone entirely. I’m not going to pretend it costs nothing.
I’d just rather have this — and deal with the rest later if I need to — than chase the life that others picked for me and that others can hold over me. ”
Ivy leans in. “He doesn’t want to leave because of me,” she says, wrapping her arms around both of our waists. “It’s kind of obvious.”
“No offense, Ives,” I say, laughing, “but it’s less about you and more about the girl I love.”
Sloane’s face does three things at once — lips part, chin dips, eyes go to liquid — and then it breaks open into a smile, wide and helpless and completely ridiculous. It’s the smile from the pool, the one she spent a whole year refusing to let anyone see in public.
I kiss her, both hands on her face, thumbs along her jaw. She kisses me back, her fingers curling into the lapels of my jacket. Somewhere behind us somebody — Theo, it’s always Theo — whoops, and somebody shushes him.
Then the room goes. The whoop, the band, the thirty feet of carpet I’ve been performing across all night — gone. There’s just the warm press of her mouth and the lapels of my jacket fisted in her hands like she’s done having her path dictated too.
When she pulls back, she keeps her forehead against my chin. “You’re shaking, Rowan,” she says.
“I know.”
“Is it the public declaration or the emotional vulnerability?” she says. “Or the burning need to line up every glass on that bar top?”
“All of those,” I say. “Shut up.”
She laughs, this bright, unstoppable thing, and I’m nowhere near done listening to that laugh or holding her or kissing her when a throat clears behind me, and I know exactly whose it is before I even turn around.
“Rowan.”
I turn and see my father, two feet away, and for the first time ever, I can’t read his face. Sloane doesn’t let go of my hand and she doesn’t step away, standing right beside me like I did with her a second ago.
“You cannot have just said that to Patrick Cross.” It’s the managing voice, the one that taught me to solve every problem. “I’ll make a call. This is fixable.”
“There’s nothing to fix,” I say, quiet and steady, because for once I’m not managing him, I’m just telling him. “Nothing broke.”
“Rowan, please…”
“You never told me I had cleared the bar, Dad. Not once. I’d hand you a win and you’d make the game harder, because you’re the level I don’t ever get to beat.”
“Rowan,” he says, the closest thing he gets to angry. “Everything I did, I did because you were the one thing in that house that—”
He stops. The man who never fails to finish a sentence.
“I know,” I say, quieter than everything before it, because I do, and that’s the part I keep tripping on. “I know it was love. I genuinely do. I kept that house running quiet for both of you. I’m just telling you what it weighed.”
He looks at me. He looks at Sloane. He looks at our hands.
“Alright,” he says.
It’s flat — not approval, no warmth — but I’ve waited on some version of that word as long as I can remember, and I have never once watched my father set a thing down and walk away from it when he thought it needed doing.
“Alright,” I say back, holding out my hand.
He shakes it — hard, brief, the most he has — and turns and walks off into the crowd. My eyes sting and I let them. Because while it isn’t quite a “you’ve cleared it” it’s the closest he’s ever come, and I’ll take it.
Sloane’s hand squeezes mine. “You okay?” she says.
“No idea,” I say. “Bit of a mess.”
“You okay with that?”
“For now, yeah,” I say.
“Cool.”
A body slams into my back.
“BOYS.” Luca, at least one drink past sense. “This is happening.”
I sigh. “No…”
“The skipper is STAYING,” he bellows. “So we’re DANCING!”
“Luca…”
“I am not going to be the only one out there.” He rounds on Sloane. “Tell him.”
“He’s right,” she says, deadpan, and grins. “We’re dancing.”
As Sloane drags me along, Theo charges out to the dance floor, attempting a move he’s clearly practiced and which is, in execution, a public hazard — one knee going down, the other foot sliding across the polished wood, a half-second of genuine terror on his face.
I’m about to step forward to help when Niko, out of nowhere, catches Theo by the arm and hauls him upright without breaking stride or, somehow, breaking eye contact with the girl he’s been talking to all night — the barista from Maple & Main, working with the catering staff.
“You didn’t fix it,” Sloane says, watching Niko set Theo loose again.
“I wanted to.”
“I know.” She smirks. “But he found his feet. They all do, if you let them.”
That seems to fire the starting gun, and the whole night tips over into something looser and warmer. So when Sloane takes my wrist and pulls my chest to hers, she’s already laughing, one hand on my shoulder and the other on my back.
“I’m told you can’t dance,” she informs me.
“I really can’t.”
“Let’s find out.”
I’m exactly as bad as advertised — graceless, half a beat behind — and she grins and pulls me closer and won’t let me stop. But that’s okay, because everything’s gone warm and loud and far away, and I lose track of how long we’ve been out here.
Someone pops a champagne bottle.
Ivy ends up on Seb’s shoulders.
I missed the exact moment it happened. Seb has the long-suffering face of a man who knew, the second she said just for a second, that it would not be just for a second. Ivy has a champagne bottle in each hand and is conducting the band with both.
And it all feels right.