35. Chapter Thirty-Five
Stanley
I stand in the hallway with a win still up on the scoreboard somewhere behind me, and I watch Aspen Linwood walk away down a corridor that smells like rubber and bleach. Everything in me is built to go after her. I make myself stand still and let her go, and it costs me more than the punch did.
Last week, I knew what I’d done. I had the misread in my hand. I could fix it. This time I’ve got nothing.
You should have taken the offer.
I run it back, and it won’t make sense in any direction.
But if my memory serves me right, I winked, and she’d gone white with her phone in her hands. Coach Linwood must’ve gotten to her, and her father is not a man to reckon with. This much I can put together.
But it’s not the whole thing, and I can feel the parts that don’t sit flush.
People don’t crater like that because of their dad’s disappointment.
So the other thought comes up, the uglier one, the one I keep circling — maybe it’s me.
Maybe I moved too fast. The trip, the night, the window, all of it inside a week.
Maybe I crowded a person afraid of love, went all in the second she let me through the door, and her dad was just the crack the rest of it poured through.
I cycle between the two and can’t land on either. The not-knowing is torture for a guy whose entire gift is knowing early. I keep reaching for the read that resolves it, and my hand keeps closing on air.
I end up in my truck and take the ten minutes home on muscle memory, and then I can’t make myself go inside — the house is full of boys riding the win, music through the walls, Rowan’s pie, the whole loud filthy thing I turned down the NHL to keep — and I cannot walk into a celebration tonight.
So I sit in my truck on Hawthorne Street with the engine off.
Three doors down, her windows are dark.
She was supposed to come over tonight. No party, just you. I keep looking at the dark window and think about the version of this night where she’s in my passenger seat right now giving me grief about the wink, and instead she’s three doors down, having decided she’s a thing I need saving from.
My phone lights up.
Dad.
Worst possible timing, but I answer it anyway.
“There he is!” Robert, big and warm, riding high. “Caught the third on the stream — Cup, that kill after Golding went off, that shorthanded shift, that was men’s-league poise, you hear me? I about put my foot through the coffee table. Your mother had to talk me down off it.”
“Thanks, Dad.” It comes out flat. I try to put something on it and can’t.
He goes a minute more, proud, replaying my own game back to me, and I let him, because I’ve got nothing for the gaps. And then he arrives at the place he’s probably been running through his mind over and over since I broke the news to him.
“Listen, I won’t harp. But the spring thing.
You know the door’s open, yeah? They’d take you the second you said the word.
I just — a window like this doesn’t stay open forever, and I’d hate to watch you talk yourself out of it because the timing felt noble.
” A warm pause. “Keep your eye on the main thing right now. Don’t let anything pull your focus. This is the window, Cup.”
Don’t let anything pull your focus.
He means it kindly. He’s not wrong about hockey, and he isn’t being cruel.
“Dad,” I say, and then I don’t have the rest of the sentence.
He hears it. “How’s Aspen?”
I can’t answer that. I open my mouth, and there’s nothing in it. The silence runs too long, and that’s the whole answer.
“Hang on,” he says. “Let me put your mother on.”
A shuffle, a muffled handoff, and then my mom’s voice, clear and dry the way it always is.
“Stanley.”
“Hi, Mom.”
“You played beautifully, and you sound like someone died. So.” A pause, and I can see her exactly, leaning on the kitchen counter with her glasses pushed up into her hair, the way she’s stood for every important conversation of my life. “Tell me, or don’t.”
And maybe it’s that I’m wrecked, or that it’s her, or that she’s the one person alive who has never once needed me to do the bit — but it comes out.
Not the fake relationship. I’m not handing her that part.
But that something happened with Aspen. That she ended it.
That she’s decided I’m throwing my career away over her and can’t carry it, and she walked, and I don’t know how to fix it because I don’t fully understand what broke.
My mother is quiet for a moment.
“Can I tell you something I have never said to you?” she says. “And I want you to really hear it. Not wave it off as your mother being dramatic.”
“Okay.”
“I have been married to your father for thirty-one years. I love him. He’s a good man.
And he chose hockey over this family more times than I could count, and every single time, he will tell you he didn’t have a choice.
That’s the part I need to land for you. He’s not lying when he says it.
He believes it. The men in this family — your father, your grandfather, all of them — only ever learned the one way to do it.
Game first. Game over everything. And because it’s the only way they were ever taught, they will look you dead in the eye and swear to you on their lives it’s the only way there is.
” Her voice doesn’t climb. “And it’s not.
I’ve watched a lot of good men break their own hearts certain that it was. ”
I don’t say anything. I’m strangling the wheel of a parked truck in the dark.
“So when your father tells you not to let anything pull your focus,” she says, “hear it for what it is. It isn’t wisdom. It’s a man handing you the only map he was ever given, and the map is missing half the world.”
“Mom—”
“I’m not done.” Dry, fond, immovable. “Here’s your part.
You did not turn that team down because you’re sentimental, whatever your father and Bart Linwood have decided between the two of them.
I watched you at Thanksgiving, Stanley. I’ve watched you your whole life.
You are not a boy who has ever been confused about hockey — not once in your life.
You made that call clean, and you’re at peace with it, and if this were really about the game, you’d be annoyed tonight.
You’re not annoyed. You’re destroyed.” She pauses.
“And you’re destroyed because of the girl. ”
My throat does something. “Yeah.”
“You turned it down because for the first time in your whole life you wanted something that was yours. Not the thing we picked. Not the thing anyone else thinks is best. Something you chose, on your own, with nobody’s hand on it but yours.
” She lets it sit. “And now a roomful of frightened people are telling you that you have to give it back to keep the career — and you’re believing them.
Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare, Stanley.
The people who tell you that you have to choose are the ones who never figured out how to hold two things at the same time. ”
She has no idea how literally true it is — something that was yours.
She thinks she’s talking about a girl I’ve loved out in the open for months.
She doesn’t know the girl started as a lie and turned into the only honest thing in my life.
But it goes into a lock I didn’t know was there and it turns.
“You’re sharp,” she says, softer. The highest thing she’s got, and she doesn’t spend it loosely. “So be sharp about this one, too. Don’t let them sell you the false choice. That’s all I’ve got.”
Somewhere in the middle of it — I don’t know exactly when — headlights swing onto the street, and a car pulls in three doors down, and I watch Aspen get out.
I watch her cross the little stretch of sidewalk to her door, small and straight-backed and alone, keys in her fist. The porch light catches her for a second. The door opens and closes.
Her bedroom light comes on a moment later. A while later, it goes off. And sitting there watching her windows go dark with my mother’s voice still in my ear, the whole thing turns over, and I finally see the play — not the one she ran on me, I still can’t see all of that — but the bigger one.
She thinks she’s the anchor.
She has it exactly backwards.
The career was never the thing in danger.
Mom’s right — I’m going pro, I was always going pro, fall instead of February changes the size of the headline and not one other thing.
Hockey was never at risk. There was exactly one thing put on the table to be destroyed tonight, one real thing in danger, and it’s the single thing in my entire life I ever picked for myself — and I’ve been sitting in a cold truck for an hour letting her father and her fear and my own dad’s half-a-map talk me toward handing it over.
The thing every single one of them keeps calling a liability — the distraction, the reason, the anchor — is the only choice I ever made that was mine.
And I’m not giving it back. Not to Coach Linwood.
Not to my dad. Not to the version of the lie that’s set up shop inside her own head and convinced her she’s the one standing in my way.
I have spent my whole life being told what I’m allowed to want, and I am done.
I handed back a timeline that wasn’t mine on Thursday.
I am not going to turn around a day later and let them take the one thing that is.
I can have both. They were never opposed. The only people who ever thought they were opposed are the people who never learned to carry two things at once. I’m not going to be one of them, and I am sure as hell not going to stand by and let her be one of them either.
And then I hit the brakes, hard, because everything in me wants to be out of this truck and across those forty feet and on her step right now.
I don’t move.
Two reasons, and I make myself hold both.
One, I chased her on the porch, and I learned what chasing twice costs.
Two, and bigger — what she said in that hallway was not an argument.
I keep wanting it to be one, because I’m good at arguments.
I could win an argument. I could stand on her step and lay out my mother’s whole case and be right.
But she didn’t crash this over a fact she got wrong.
She crashed it because she believes, somewhere older and deeper than tonight, that she could be in the way of an NHL career.
That’s not something I can undo with a speech at eleven o’clock at night.
I can’t tell her she isn’t the anchor. She won’t hear it. She’s heard words before. Words are part of what got her here.
I have to prove it.
And I don’t know how yet. That’s the honest truth of where I’m sitting.
I’ve got the decision and not one piece of the plan.
I know I’m not signing early. I know I’m not letting her go.
I know the next move can’t be a chase or a speech.
It has to be something that takes the belief apart at the root, rather than arguing with the branches.
I just don’t know what it is yet.
The call ends, and I’m clearer than I’ve been in days.
I take my phone out and look at her name. And I don’t text her.
That’s the discipline. Crowding her tonight is a bad mistake.
She needs a night without me. So I put the phone down and let her keep the distance she’s sure is going to save me.
She thinks she did the loving thing tonight — walked away to save me from herself.
She’s going to find out she’s wrong about that.
I just have to work out how to prove it.
I sit in the truck for a long time, watching the dark window three doors down.