Thirteen
The air in the room feels too thin to breathe.
I shove off my stool before I’ve made the conscious decision to move, the scrape of wood against the floor loud enough to cut through the hum of the emergency lighting.
“I’m checking the window seals,” I say. “Make sure the snow isn’t breaching the frames.”
Gabriel gets to his feet. “I’ll take the back.”
We separate like magnets flipped to repel each other, moving to opposite ends of the bar, and I’m grateful to put distance between my body and the resurfacing reality of my trashed destiny.
My fingertips trace the lower windowpane. The cold on the other side bleeds straight through the glass and into my skin, grounding me. Outside, the snow has stacked itself past the sill—the street is gone, the whole village swallowed into a flat, white nothing.
We’re not going anywhere.
I make myself move to the next window. And the next. I press my palms to the cold glass, run my thumb along the frame seals. The motions give my hands something to do while my brain refuses to stop replaying the look on his face when he said it.
I remember enough.
Not everything. Enough. And something in the careful precision of that word made me feel like he was being more honest than a full confession would have been.
When I loop back to the front of the room, Gabriel is already waiting near the mechanical wolf, hands shoved into the pockets of his coat.
In the red emergency light, the machine looks like something out of a fever dream—its paint almost black, the chrome trim catching the glow in dull, muted flashes.
“Rear exit is snowed in,” he reports. “Weather stripping is holding. No drafts in your office or storage.”
“Same up front.” I fold my arms across my ribs and don’t look directly at him. “My dad had the building wrapped in spray foam insulation. He always said, ‘If you’re going to be in the mountains, be in the mountains.’”
I stop, aware that I’m talking about my father to the man who made his death harder. Who robbed me of the future my dad worked hard to give me, leaving me with less money, less future, less of myself to give him.
I clamp my mouth shut.
The sudden, sickening realization of who I am talking to sucks the remaining air out of the room. The silence goes heavy and hollow, burying us both.
Gabriel is looking at me, his expression pensive. It’s disarming.
I look away, filing that realization somewhere I won’t have to examine tonight.
We make our way back to the bar where the dregs of our stew await, cold past saving. Stacking the bowls, I carry them to the sink and set them in the basin for later. Thirty seconds of work. I stretch it to a minute.
Gabriel’s spoon is still on the bar. He picks it up and turns it over in his fingers.
“So, how many times did you practice it?” I ask.
He goes still.
“Whatever that was.” I keep my voice even, clinical. “You’ve had that whole disastrous road trip to put it together.”
He sets the spoon down. “More than I can count.”
“And this is the version you landed on?”
“There isn’t a version.” The words come out rougher than he probably intended—honest in a way that polished never could be. “There’s nothing I can put in the right order that fixes it.”
I’ve been cataloging the physical evidence of his exhaustion all night—the split lip, the bruising—but seeing the slump of his shoulders confirms what I suspected earlier. The golden boy arrogance is gone.
“I know,” I say finally.
His eyes snap to mine.
“That there’s no version,” I clarify, before he can take it for more than it is. “I just wanted to know if you tried.”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I tried.” He presses his tongue to the split in his lip, testing it. “I watched your highlights.”
I go very still. The emergency lights dip, stutter, and hold. In the half-second of dimming, the red bleeds nearly to black, and the bar feels suddenly, acutely small.
“After I found the Reddit thread.” His voice is careful. Measured. Like he’s disarming something, one wire at a time. “There were highlight reels going back to your bantam years. I watched all of them.”
My hands go still on the bar. I don’t trust myself to speak.
“You were a centre.” It’s not a question. “You saw the ice like—” He stops. Starts again. “You saw where people were going to be, not where they were. Most guys in the league don’t see it that clean.”
“Don’t.” The word comes out before I can stop it, low and strained.
“I’m not saying it to—”
“I know why you’re saying it.” I turn on the stool to face him, and the look on his face nearly undoes me—it’s so stripped of performance, so unguarded, that for a second I can’t remember why I hate him.
I have to actively reach for it. “You’re saying it because you need me to know that you understand the scale of it.
What you took.” I swallow. “And I do want you to understand it. I’ve wanted that for seven years.
But hearing it from your mouth right now, after your terrible road trip and your public breakdown—it doesn’t land the way I needed it to. ”
He holds my gaze without trying to fill the silence.
That’s the part I wasn’t prepared for. The stillness in him. I built a version of this confrontation in my head, and in every version, he defended himself—made excuses, minimized, deflected. I had seventeen different responses ready for seventeen different versions of his ego.
I have nothing ready for a man who just sits there and takes it.
“It was the Hockey Canada pipeline,” I say, and I hear my own voice change as I say it, but I can’t keep the pain from straining my vocal cords.
It’s the first time I’ve said these words out loud to anyone.
“I had a coach at Hockey Canada centralization telling my dad I was tracking toward the U22 program. Olympic long list by twenty if I kept developing.” I pause.
“That was the conversation that happened three weeks before Calgary.”
“Jesus,” Gabriel says. It comes out as a harsh exhale.
“Yeah.” I look at the wall of memorabilia.
At my father’s framed tournament photo. At the girl in the front row with the stupid, boundless smile.
“So when you say you understand the scale of it—you didn’t destroy some small-town kid’s junior career.
You destroyed an Olympic trajectory. I just want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing.
“And I never got the chance to find out if I could’ve clawed it back.
” My voice is flat. “Three weeks after Calgary, before the scouts even finished dropping me, my dad’s hands started shaking.
The diagnosis came back uglier than either of us expected.
I didn’t get to fight my way through the scandal and see what survived on the other side.
I got a choice between a comeback nobody was promising me and the man who mortgaged his whole life so I could chase it in the first place.
” I look at him. “That’s not a story about resilience.
That’s just what happens when someone lights a fuse and you’re standing in the blast radius when everything else falls too. ”
The silence that follows is different. Complete. It’s the sound of all his rehearsed drafts disintegrating.
Slowly rising from his stool, Gabriel presses both hands flat on the bar. He stares at the wood as if the physical weight of what I just told him requires him to brace himself.
“I’m sorry.”
It’s the first time he’s actually said the words, and they fall into the space between us sounding impossibly small. Flimsy. He hears it, too. He squeezes his eyes shut.
“God, that’s pathetic,” he rasps, his knuckles going white against the wood.
“I know that doesn’t touch it. I know an apology doesn’t fix a thing.
There’s nothing I can give you that balances the scales.
There’s no transaction that makes it even.
I’ve been sitting with that for forty-two nights and I still don’t know what to do with it. ”
I stand up. I don’t plan to—my body makes the decision and my brain catches up two seconds later. I cross the space between us and stop in front of him, close enough that I can see the exact shade of mottled purple along his cheekbone. The split in his lip is a dark seam under the emergency light.
He doesn’t move or reach for me. Just watches, like he doesn’t trust himself to do anything other than stay very, very still.
I reach up. My fingertips feather along his bruise—light enough that I’m barely touching him.
He exhales like I’ve just removed something lodged in his chest.
“You look terrible,” I say quietly.
“I bet.” His voice is rough. He leans infinitesimally into the touch, his eyes searching mine. “Listen, Ivy…”
I shake my head, my throat already constricting from what I shared with him. “Don’t.”
“I just need you to know that I see you.” His hand comes up slowly, his broad, warm fingers settling over my knuckles cautiously. “The player you were. What I cost you. I can’t unsee it. And I’m not asking you to forgive—”
“Good,” I say, my voice dropping to a whisper. “Because I’m not interested in what you’re asking for.”
He is looking at me the way people look at things they know they can’t keep. It’s the gravitational pull of two people who carry the exact shape of each other’s damage.
I should step back.
But my palm is still against his jaw. And his thumb is tracing a slow, burning line across my knuckles.
The world narrows to the inch of space between our mouths, the hitch in his breath, the way he angles toward me so slowly he probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it—
A grinding shriek from the far corner of the bar shatters the moment, followed by the clanking whirr of a motor catching hard on stored charge.
We lurch apart with the kind of full-body shock that bypasses conscious thought entirely, two people reacting to a sound that hits like a gunshot in a sealed room.
I whip my head to find the source, the rhythm of my heartbeat a racing staccato.
My gaze catches on the mechanical wolf. It jerks through a single, stuttering cycle—hips torquing, head snapping—before the motor catches, chokes, and dies with a final, guttural clunk that resonates through the floor.
Then silence.
The emergency lights hum their unchanged red. Nothing else in the bar flickers. The power is still out.
We stare at the machine. It’s perfectly still now, its LED eyes dark and lifeless, one chrome stirrup hanging at a slightly wrong angle.
“What the—” Gabriel starts.
“Capacitor discharge,” I manage, forcing the words through a throat that feels entirely too dry. Swallowing, I take a slow, deliberate step backward, putting safe, freezing air between us. “The backup battery just gave out.”
I’m talking about a mechanical wolf. We both know that’s not what just happened here.
Gabriel makes a sound that might have been a breath of a laugh if everything weren’t so raw. He runs both hands through his hair, leaving it disheveled.
Before he can turn to face me, I step behind the bar. Back into my territory.
“The couch in my office pulls out,” I say, my voice finding its footing again, collected. I don’t look at him, focusing instead on the dull red reflection in the bar’s surface. “I’ll get the bedding.”
Gabriel follows me in silence as I head toward the small supply closet near the back hallway.
The space is cramped, forcing us into a proximity that makes the air feel heavy again.
I reach for the top shelf, pulling down two thick wool blankets and a pair of pillows.
I turn and press one set into his chest. He takes them, his fingers brushing mine for a fraction of a second—a spark I ignore.
“Tonight was an anomaly, Gabriel,” I say, my voice low and hard. “The storm, the power, the...everything. Don’t go thinking this is a bridge. When the sun comes up and the plows arrive, we go back to being strangers. That’s the only way this partnership works.”
Gabriel looks at the bedding in his arms, then back at me. In the dim light, the exhaustion in his eyes looks permanent.
“Yeah, I get that,” he says. He pauses at the office door, his silhouette framed in the doorway. “But for the record? Whatever happens tomorrow, I’m glad we finally talked.”
“Get some sleep,” I say, already turning my back on him. I don’t wait for a response; I don’t want to see whatever expression he’s wearing in the dark.
I hear the office door shut with a careful click.
I carry my own blankets to the corner booth—the one closest to the wall where the old leather is worn soft. I fold myself into the corner of it, pull the wool to my chin, and stare at the ceiling.
The blizzard is quieter now—still there, still pressing against the glass, but the worst of the fury has settled into something more resigned. A long exhale after an enormous effort.
Forty-two nights, he said.
I’ve been counting for seven years.
Through the thin office wall, I hear the creak of the pullout, the rustle of movement as he tries to get comfortable on a mattress that was never meant for someone his size. Then, finally, quiet.
I close my eyes.
We go back to strangers in the morning.
But tonight happened. And now I’m going to have to work a lot harder to pretend it didn’t.