Twenty-Nine #3
Brock checks his phone and pockets it. “I should go too. Haven’t packed.” He drops his mug in the rack, grabs his jacket.
He claps Gabriel once on the shoulder on his way past—no words, just contact, brief and solid. Then the back door, the cold, the latch.
Holt’s still by the bar. He looks at Gabriel—the wrinkled suit, the bruise, the absence of a vehicle anywhere in the lot—and makes the calculation without asking.
“I’ll give you a ride up,” he says. “Need to swing by the arena anyway.” He pushes off the bar and heads for the door, then pauses. “I’ll be in the car. Take five.”
The door swings shut behind Holt. Four mugs sit abandoned on the bar, one still steaming. Just Gabriel, me, and a room built for forty.
There’s a version of this morning where I sit with last night—tangled in the one man I’ve spent seven years hating, asleep on a pullout too small for both of us and not moving anyway.
I’m not building that room yet. Too many other fires still lit.
Later, when the reporters are gone and the bar’s not running on a countdown clock, I’ll take it out and look at it properly.
Gabriel stays on the customer side. “Holt’s waiting.”
I keep wiping the same spot. “Yeah.”
He watches me, eyes steady.
“I’ll see you in eight days.”
My throat tightens. A physical blow, clean and sudden—stepping off a curb you didn’t see.
I nod. Nodding’s easier than whatever’s actually in my throat.
Gabriel doesn’t move.
He stands at the end of the bar, hands on the wood, fingers spread like he’s grounding himself.
I scrub the same clean patch until the cloth drags.
“Go,” I say, because if I don’t, my throat fills up with everything else.
His eyes stay on my hands.
“I will.” His voice sits low, scraped. “I just—”
Nothing after it. He swallows the rest like it tastes bad.
I reach for the bourbon bottle to give myself a job. Straighten the label. Then the rye beside it. Then the same bourbon again, because control loops don’t care about logic.
A soft sound—his shoes shifting. He comes around the end of the bar, steps into my space, close enough that the edge of his cologne mixes with pine cleaner and cold air sneaking under the door.
His hand lands over mine on the cloth.
Big palm. Warm. Steady weight.
I look up right away this time.
“Don’t break anything,” I say.
His mouth twitches, not quite a smile.
“Which thing.”
“The team. My bar. Your face. Pick one.”
His fingers flex once over my knuckles, like he’s counting them.
“My face is already a write-off.”
“Don’t get cocky about it.”
He leans in just enough that my body reacts before my brain signs off. His other hand comes up, two fingers at my jaw, thumb grazing the line of my chin—checking, not taking.
I let him.
“Eat something real,” he says. “Not just bar nuts.”
“You’re not my coach, Castellano.”
His gaze dips to my mouth, comes back up slow.
“I’ll text when we land.”
My chest pulls tight. “Don’t,” I say, but the word has no teeth.
“I’ll miss you too, Hayes.”
He rubs his thumb once against my jaw, a small claiming friction, then drops his hand. The absence of his heat hits my skin like a draft. My throat tightens.
“Try not to start a riot in Toronto,” I shoot back instead.
His mouth quirks. A real smile this time.
“No promises.”
He backs up a step, eyes on my face like he’s memorizing the lighting for later. Then he turns, crosses to the door.
At the threshold, hand on the latch, he doesn’t look back.
“Hayes.”
“Go,” I insist.
His shoulders shake once, a silent laugh. Then he’s gone.
The latch clicks.
I stand where he left me and listen to the building breathe.
Delilah’s still at the far end of the bar, shuffling the same three pages into a folder that doesn’t need it. She’s been doing it since the guys left—reordering, straightening, reordering again.
“You can stop,” I say. “Lawyer’s not open today.”
She doesn’t look up. “I want it ready for tomorrow.”
“It’s ready. You made it ready four hours ago.” I come around the bar and take the folder gently out of her hands. “Go home, Delilah. Sleep. You’ve done enough for one year that technically started this morning.”
A tired laugh, small and real. She lets me set the folder down, but she doesn’t move for the door.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing,” she replies quickly. Then, slower: “I keep thinking about Gerald. Braxton’s dad.” She scratches the side of her head. “He walked out of that launch like nothing touched him. And nothing has.”
The bar fridge hums into the silence. I look at the bottles behind me instead of at her.
“There’s a reason for that,” I say.
Delilah rests her hands on the bar.
“The morning after the mixer.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect—like I’ve rehearsed this in some back room without knowing it.
“Right before hotel checkout. A concierge called my room. Said there was a confidential meeting downstairs. I walked into a boardroom where Gerald Hicks waited for me.”
I don’t look at her.
“He slid a manila envelope across the table. Told me the amount was generous. Told me the NDA was standard.” My throat works. “What he meant was: take the money, let the story stand, and never tell anyone it was invented.”
“He never said whose money it was. He didn’t have to.
The whole meeting was staged so a seventeen-year-old would fill in the blank herself—the top prospect’s people, cleaning up after their golden boy before the draft.
So that’s what I believed. For seven years I thought Gabriel paid to bury me.
” I straighten the folder on the bar so my hands have a job.
“Turns out the man across the table was covering for his own son, and he let Gabriel’s name take the weight. Cheaper than a second cheque.”
Delilah doesn’t speak. The kind of silence that means she’s recalculating the timeline of everything she thought she already knew about me.
“I signed it. Told myself I’d take the reset—come home for two weeks, breathe, go back, and outplay a rumor.” A short, ugly sound leaves me. “I was home a month when Dad sat me down at the corner table and told me about the diagnosis. Months, the doctors said.”
I look at the till. Dad’s photo propped beside it.
“So there it was. Go back to a dressing room full of girls who’d stopped meeting my eyes and chase the dream through that—or stay, and hold his hand through whatever was left.
I was so tired I let myself believe the choice had already been made for me.
Told myself the doors were probably shut anyway.
” I finally look at her. “Some days I still don’t know if that was true.
That’s the part Gerald really bought. Not my silence. My certainty.
“He got three years, in the end. The doctors said months and he took three years, and I was here for all of it. That part I’ve never once been sorry for.
“The money kept this place from going under. Then it paid for Dad’s care. Told myself survival and shame could share a body if they had to.”
“Ivy.” Just my name. She doesn’t reach for me. She knows better—knows I’ll bolt if she does it now, before I’m done.
“Are you going after him?” she asks after a moment. “Pressuring a minor into an NDA—there’s got to be something there.”
I think about it. Actually think about it, for the first time since the words left my mouth instead of just living behind my ribs.
“No,” I say.
She waits.
“I spent everything I had fighting Gabriel’s mess for the last month.
I don’t have anything left for Gerald’s.
” I almost laugh at myself—two not right nows in one day, two completely different doors I’m choosing not to walk through.
“Maybe someday. Today I just want my bar standing and my best friend going home to sleep.”
Something settles in Delilah’s face.
“Okay,” she says.
She picks up her coat and puts it on this time.
“I’m going home, then.” She pauses at the door. “You sure you’re good?”
“Getting there.”
She studies me a second longer than necessary, then lets it go, the way we both do.
The back door clicks shut behind her.
I set the cloth down. My fingers find cardstock in my back pocket—the Minor Hockey Association card. I pull it out, turn it over once, then set it on the bar beside the till, face up, right where I’ll see it the next time I count cash. I leave it there to argue with me.
I grab the borrowed silk dress and pumps from the office, shove them into a tote with my clutch. Kill the overheads one bank at a time. The room dims into winter afternoon light. Coat from the hook, zip it to my chin, step outside. The lock turns with a hard little clunk.
Cold air clears the last warmth off my skin.
The Village looks rinsed out—snow shoved into dirty piles at the curb, sidewalks wet and shining, tourists gone back to their condos.
I walk briskly toward the bus loop, past the hardware shop, past the best ice cream in town.
The Sin Bin’s windows are dark when I pass.
No streamers. No DJ lights. Just glass reflecting a gray sky.
At the bus loop, the #10 is already idling. I step on, tap my card, take a seat by the window.
My mind wanders to Gabriel without meaning to. Somewhere on the highway by now, duffel bag at his feet, Holt beside him—saying nothing, or saying everything. I don’t know which, and for once that’s all right.
I almost lost everything.
I’m still here. Barely.
I don’t count eight days. I don’t touch that thought. I keep my eyes on the Sea-to-Sky Highway down to Creekside and let the heater on the bus dry the cold off my cheeks.