Chapter 7 – Brianna
The bar is quiet tonight, which is exactly what I needed for this final study session.
I’ve come to learn that Brookhaven Brews always smells like old wood, coffee and something deep fried.
On a Tuesday night in late August with the summer crowd thinning out, it feels like the closest thing I have to peace right now.
I moved here ten months ago on the advice of a stranger who slept with my temporary roommate, Alexa, after my one-night stand with Seth Tremblay.
Then, I met Penn, one of the forwards for the Mayhem, during my internship and he said it sounded like exactly the kind of place I'd romanticize into my whole personality within a week. He was totally right.
I took the train out on a whim, walked the main street once, found a coffee shop that only served drinks out of holiday themed mugs and a window seat overlooking the town that the lake is wrapped around, and never really went back to the city except for work.
It reminds me a little of the Midwest but without all the tornados and dirt.
I've got my textbooks spread across the bar top even though I finished my doctorate program exactly one week ago, because old habits are hard to break and also because flipping through highlighted pages full of my detailed notes feels like holding onto something familiar when everything else feels slightly unmoored.
In another week I'll be sitting for the NPTE exam. It’s the last one standing between me and my license as a Doctor of Physical Therapy, and after that, my promotion with the Manhattan Mayhem becomes official.
Has the forced proximity with my father helped mend our relationship? No.
Has he tried? Also no.
I always try to see the good in people. I believe that almost everyone has the capacity to love, to be loved and is worthy of being shown kindness. But my father—his past actions and his present ones—remain the exception to my rule. That and he’s avoided me almost entirely.
Did I ever think I'd be working in hockey post-graduation? No.
Did I expect to spend a year interning with my estranged father's team and somehow, against all reasonable odds, fall in love with the team and the sport? Also no.
But here we are. The players are funnier and kinder than I expected, the work is genuinely satisfying in a way that surprises me every day, and the only real complication, the one I've been carefully not thinking about for the past ten months, officially moved to Brookhaven a few days ago and lives four houses down the street.
Yes, I just found out that Seth Tremblay now lives in the same city as me.
I shove a French fry into my mouth and flip to a page I've already read four times while trying not to think about how awkward that run-in will be.
"What are you doing here tonight?" My roommate Natasha Carpenter slides up beside me, hip bumping mine, her apron twisted slightly from whatever crisis she just handled in the back of the bar. She reaches across the space and steals one of my fries.
Natasha Carpenter has managed Brookhaven Brews for the past three years and is, in almost every measurable way, my complete opposite.
Where I'm looking for the small, beautiful moment in every interaction, she’s looking for chaos and a good time.
Where I want to squeeze your hand and tell you it's going to be okay, she wants to bury the problem and move on, pretend it doesn’t exist. She is unsentimental and practical and occasionally terrifyingly wild, and somehow, she's become one of my favorite people in the whole world.
"Free food," I say. "Struggling new-grad budget."
She gives me a look that says she gets it.
It’s true. Her parents are billionaires but estranged from her and her older brother and my father is disgustingly wealthy.
We’ve both made a personal policy of not touching a cent of our family’s money beyond what my father agreed to fund for my final year of school, because taking anything else feels like letting him off the hook for twenty-seven years of absence and zero effort. I'm not interested in doing that.
"I have something that might help with that, actually.
" She leans against the bar, arms crossed, with the expression she gets when she's about to tell me something I'm not going to like.
I've learned to read that expression over the past ten months.
It's different from her regular resting face, which is usually lighter.
This one has a slight tension around the eyes. "I need to tell you something."
I set down my fry. "That face is not a good face."
She points at her face. “This one has charmed many patrons.”
I laugh. "Natasha."
She exhales. "Okay. So. You know how I mentioned that the Callaghan's have been talking about selling the bar?"
I nod. The owners of Brookhaven Brews are an older couple who've been making retirement noises for the better part of a year and are wholly terrible at managing the place we’re currently seated in.
Natasha has been quietly, methodically saving everything she can toward the possibility of buying it herself, which would be the least surprising thing that has ever happened because this bar is essentially already hers in every way that matters.
"Yeah. Is something happening with that?"
"It's moving faster than I thought. They want to finalize something before the end of the year.
" She says it simply, but I can see the excitement mixed with nerves in her eyes.
"Which means I need to be fully available to take over operations. All hands, all the time, no distractions. It’s going to be a lot of work. "
"Natasha, that's amazing. Seriously."
"It's going to cost me a lot."
I hear the worry in that statement. Time. Money. Relationships. I’ve never owned anything, but I can already see the weight of it on her.
"You'll figure it out. You always do."
She nods once, accepting this, and then the tension around her eyes comes back.
"So, here's the thing. A few months ago, before any of this accelerated, I promised Boone Tremblay I'd help with his brother's daughter. Nanny stuff. Pickup from volleyball practice, homework help, getting her settled before her dad gets home and the occasional overnight stay when he’s away for work.
" She pauses. "I told him yes and then forgot to mention it to you, and then the bar situation got serious, and I realized I absolutely cannot take that on right now. "
I blink, knowing where this is going. "Okay."
"So, I told Boone that my roommate would do it instead."
There's a beat of silence.
"You told him—" I stop. "Natasha. You volunteered me for a nanny job without asking me first?"
"I knew you'd say yes."
"You didn’t know that."
"You literally just told me you're on a struggling new-grad budget and you have your mom's medical bills to deal with on top of everything else." She raises an eyebrow. "He's paying fifty dollars an hour."
I open my mouth and close it again. Fifty dollars an hour is not nothing.
Fifty dollars an hour is more than I’m making with the Mayhem and when you're staring down a debt that feels like enough to fund another doctorate degree and trying to do it on an entry-level salary while refusing your wealthy father's money on principle. My mother didn't have good insurance. The last eight months of her illness cost more than I let myself think about too directly, and the bills that came after she was gone landed on me because there was nobody else to handle them. I’m an only child. She never married. And therefore, I’ve been trying to chip away at the bills ever since.
It hasn’t been going well.
Fifty dollars an hour would help make a dent.
"It's Boone's brother," I say carefully. "Seth Tremblay?" My mind goes back to the night we met when he told me he had a twelve-year-old daughter.
"Yeah." Natasha tilts her head slightly. "You know him?"
The question hangs in the air, and I choose my next words carefully.
"I work with the Mayhem," I say. "He's a player."
"Right." She doesn't push it, which is one of the things I love about her. She's not nosey, she just understands that some information comes in its own time. "So, you know who he is. Good. That makes this all so much simpler."
It makes it the opposite of simpler.
Because what Natasha doesn't know, what I have not told her, is that Seth Tremblay is not just a player on my father's team.
He's the man I had a spectacularly ill-advised one-night stand with ten months ago, at a mandatory Halloween event, dressed as a character from a movie, on the same night I made the decision that moved me to this town.
He's also the man I ran into last night at the team dinner, who I spent an hour with in a hotel gym fighting over angel food cake and letting bench press me while I managed a full internal crisis, who I then let kiss me in a way that I haven't stopped thinking about, and who I am now almost certain realized exactly who I was right before I bolted out the gym door like my clothes was on fire.
And that’s what I’ve been processing with two cups of decaf coffee and a basketful of French fries tonight.
Coffee is for slow moments. While most people use it to wake up, I use it to unwind.
There’s nothing like curling up with a warm mug at the end of the day and watching a movie with someone you love.
I just don’t have that someone to do that with hence the bar, my old textbooks and apparently now I’m getting signed up for a nanny gig with my one-night stand.