45. Brynn
brYNN
I found out about the tire from Dani.
Which was how I found out about most things that happened in my own city, which said something about either my best friend’s surveillance capabilities or my own obliviousness.
She’d seen it on Rhett’s Instagram story — grainy, low-light, the kind of thing you posted at eleven at night without thinking.
His hands on a lug wrench in front of a car I recognized.
My mother’s car. Parked in my mother’s driveway.
Um, Dani had texted, is your mom okay and also who is the large man at her house.
Mom was fine. I’d gotten her text before Dani’s.
Everything’s fine, just couldn’t get out of the driveway, she’d said, the way she said everything was fine even when it wasn’t and occasionally when it actually was.
I’d taken her at her word because Colton had his hand over mine at the kitchen table at the time and I was still recalibrating what it felt like to have someone stay.
I thought about calling her. I thought about it for about four seconds before I put my phone face down and left it there.
She had Rhett.
That was a sentence I hadn’t expected to be able to say, and I turned it over in my head the whole drive home the next morning.
Mom had spent fifteen years making sure no one got close enough to need to say it.
She had her work and she had the stadium and she had me, and she’d arranged those three things in a careful perimeter around the part of herself she kept for Dad and didn’t let anyone else near.
I’d watched it happen in real time for years.
I’d tried to dismantle it from the outside and gotten nowhere.
And then Rhett had just walked through the perimeter like it wasn’t there.
Like he hadn’t noticed it. Like he was just a man who knew how she took her coffee and showed up when her tire was flat.
I didn’t know what to do with that except feel something ease in my chest that had been tight for a very long time.
The stadium was quiet when I came in. Early enough that the ice still had the morning chill on it, that particular cold that settled into the arena before the day started and before bodies filled it up with noise and heat.
I’d loved that smell my whole life. The sharpened-blade smell, the cold-concrete smell.
My father’s smell, even though he’d been gone long enough now that I’d stopped being surprised when something brought him back.
I stood at the edge of the ice for a while without doing anything in particular.
This was his. This whole place. He’d built it with Mom and left it to her and she’d kept it alive for years on nothing but stubbornness and grief and love that had nowhere else to go.
And somehow it had ended up being mine too, in the way things become yours when you grow up inside them.
I’d never planned to be here. English Lit degree.
College professor. The book about loss that I’d been not-writing for six years.
None of those plans included this ice, this city, this team.
But Dad’s plans hadn’t included leaving early, either.
Maybe plans were just the stories you told yourself before your real life showed up.
“You’re in early.”
Colton’s voice came from somewhere behind me and to the left, and I didn’t startle the way I would have two months ago. I’d already learned the sound of him moving. Heavy, deliberate, rubber soles on concrete. The kind of man who always knew where he was going.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.
He came to stand beside me at the boards. Close enough that his arm pressed against mine. He didn’t say anything, which was one of the things I’d decided I loved about him — that he could be quiet without making the quiet into something that needed filling.
We looked at the ice together.
“Rhett was at my mom’s last night,” I said.
A beat. “I know. He texted me.”
I looked up at him. “He texted you?”
“Said he was going to be late to morning skate. Didn’t say why.” The corner of his mouth moved. “I figured it out.”
I turned back to the ice. “She’s going to be a nightmare about it.”
“Probably.”
“She’ll convince herself it was nothing. She’ll put twelve layers of practical explanation between herself and whatever she actually felt, and then she’ll come in here and be insufferable about inventory or something.”
“Also probably.”
“And Rhett will just —” I stopped.
“Keep showing up?” Colton offered.
“Yeah.” I exhaled. “Yeah, he will.”
I’d spent so much energy trying to build something for my mother.
Trying to find the right man, the right situation, the right angle of approach.
And the whole time Rhett had just been there, in her orbit, patient in the uncalculated way young men sometimes were — not because they were trying to be, just because they hadn’t yet learned to hedge.
I hadn’t engineered it. I hadn’t even seen it coming.
It had just happened the way the best things happened, quietly, while everyone was looking somewhere else.
I felt Colton’s hand find mine at the boards. He didn’t make a thing of it. Just laced his fingers through mine and stood there.
“She’s going to be okay,” he said. Not a question.
“I know.” I squeezed his hand. “I think I’ve known for a while. I just needed to stop being the one in charge of it.”
The ice stretched out in front of us, fresh and unmarked.
Jimbo hadn’t brought the Zamboni out yet.
In an hour it would be full of noise and blades and Jett doing something inadvisable near the boards while Rhett yelled at him about it.
The season was three games old and we’d won two of them, and somewhere across town my mother had a man who knew how she took her coffee and wasn’t going anywhere.
I thought about the book I’d never written.
The one about grief, about kids who lost their parents too soon, about the part nobody told you where you had to figure out how to stop carrying it as your whole personality.
I thought about what it would feel like to actually sit down and write it.
Not someday. Not once things settled. Now.
“Hey,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“When you said I could go anywhere.” I tilted my head up to look at him. “I want to stay here. I just — I want to stay here and also write the book. I want both things.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Then have both things.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple.” He turned to face me, his free hand coming up to tuck that one stubborn curl behind my ear the way he always did, like he’d been doing it for years. “You’ve been treating your own life like a thing you’ll get to eventually. Stop doing that.”
I held his eyes. “You’re very bossy for someone who just deleted three voicemails.”
“I am,” he agreed. “Write the book, Brynn.”
I turned back to the ice. And just like that, without warning, a sentence arrived in my head fully formed, the way the real ones always did — the ones that had been living in you so long they stopped asking permission.
The part nobody tells you about losing a parent young is that grief doesn’t end. It just finds quieter places to live.
I’d write that down when I got home. For the first time in six years, I actually believed I would.
The ice sat there waiting. Patient. Cold and clean and full of possibility, the way this place had always felt to me even on the days when everything else felt stuck.
I turned back to it and let myself stand there in the quiet with the man who was staying, in the city that was mine, in the stadium my father built and my mother kept alive and I was only just beginning to understand was also, always, going to be a part of whatever came next.
Colton’s thumb moved across my knuckles, slow and deliberate, the way he did everything. And then, without looking away from the ice, he said it like it was the simplest thing in the world.
“I’m not going back to New York, Brynn.”
I looked up at him. He was still watching the ice, but the corner of his mouth had done that thing it did when he meant something more than he was saying.
“No?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Everything I want is right here.”
I turned back to the ice so he wouldn’t see how hard that landed.
It was enough.
It was more than enough.
It was the start.