Chapter 16
sixteen
Dani
On that same Thursday morning, while Luke was waking up across town, his face was already staring back at me from three different magazine covers.
I noticed them at the newsstand outside the hospital on my way in for a twelve-hour shift, tea in one hand and my badge already clipped to my scrub top.
I stopped just long enough to read the headlines before making myself keep walking.
THE UNDERDOG'S HOUR.
BACKUP NO MORE.
Another cover showed him mid-save, body stretched flat across the crease, printed under a headline asking whether Bryan Jones would ever get his job back.
The hockey world was watching him. All of it. All at once. Just looking at his face behind the newsstand glass made my chest go tight.
I didn't buy any of the magazines. I already knew more than the papers did, and none of it made me feel better about anything.
The ER was slammed from the second I clocked in—allergic reactions overlapping with a multi-car accident on the parkway, every bay full, every hallway lined with gurneys waiting on rooms that didn't exist yet. I convinced myself it was the perfect excuse to take a break from thinking about Luke.
For hours, I buried myself in triage codes, patient charts, and IV lines.
I didn’t let my mind wander until almost two in the afternoon, when I finally managed to steal a fifteen-minute break.
I sank onto a bench in the break room, my legs aching, and only then did my phone buzz in my pocket for what felt like the first time all day.
Luke. A text from that morning, one I hadn't had time to open until now.
Sorry, my phone died on the bus last night. Found an old charger. Missed you.
I read it twice.
Something inside me loosened, just slightly, at missed you—only to tighten back up just as quickly.
The last real conversation we'd had was Tuesday night. Both of us were exhausted, raw, and shorter with each other than intended. One sweet text after two days of near-silence wasn’t enough to erase the strange, cold feeling that had settled in my stomach since.
I typed back.
Hope today's going well.
Five words. I stared at them a long moment before sending, aware of how flat they'd land, aware that I was doing exactly what I always did when I felt myself getting in too deep—pulling the temperature down before it could burn me.
I sent it anyway and went back to work.
By the time I finally got a lunch break, nearly three hours later than scheduled, I checked my phone again out of habit more than hope.
Nothing.
I stood alone in the stairwell where I usually ate, sandwich untouched in my lap, and felt the particular, familiar ache of being the one who reached first only to be met with silence.
I knew, logically, that he was probably buried the same way I'd been all morning—agent calls, media obligations, whatever conversation Coach needed to have with him and Bryan about the concussion Bryan had apparently reported.
I'd pieced that part together from a text Maya had sent earlier, half-warning, half-gossip:
Heard through Eli that there's drama with Bryan and the concussion thing. Everything okay on your end?
I hadn't answered that one yet either. I didn't have the energy to explain, over text, in the middle of a twelve-hour shift, exactly how much of that concussion protocol I'd personally run.
For two straight nights I'd sat up with a cool cloth and a symptom log, doing exactly what a real medical team should have been doing from day one.
All of that so Luke could keep a secret that had apparently just detonated on him anyway.
I ate half my sandwich. Threw the rest away. Went back to the floor.
This was exactly what I'd been afraid of.
Not the silence itself—people got busy, phones died, days ran away from everyone sometimes. What I feared was the particular, sickening familiarity of watching a man's career get bigger right in front of me while the space he left for me got smaller in exact proportion.
I'd lived this movie before, different man, same script.
Lily's father had been a promising G League player with a charming smile and convincing promises right up until they became inconvenient.
He hadn't disappeared overnight. It started with texts that came slower.
Calls that got shorter and excuses more common.
And then one day, quiet just became absence.
By the time it was over, I was six months postpartum explaining to my sister why I wasn't answering when people asked where the baby's father was.
Fear isn't logical. It doesn't care about evidence. It only remembers where it was hurt last.
I was proud of everything Luke was accomplishing. I truly was. But I also understood what came with that kind of success. Fame demanded pieces of people until there wasn't much left for anyone else.
Maybe it was better to pull away now than wait until it hurt even more.
By four o'clock I felt myself doing it again—the same careful flattening of every feeling into something manageable.
My professional mask, the one I wore for grieving families and screaming toddlers and men who didn't want to hear their test results, sliding down over whatever I actually felt underneath.
It was a useful mask. It got me through twelve-hour shifts and difficult conversations and entire years of my life, if I was honest.
It was also, I understood clearly for the first time watching myself do it, the exact same mechanism Luke had learned from media training. I'd built my own version without ever calling it that.
By the time my shift ended, close to eight that evening, I still hadn't heard from him.
I drove home in silence, radio off, replaying every version of the last three days over and over, trying to pinpoint exactly where things had started slipping.
Tuesday's phone call.
That had to be it. I'd been exhausted and impatient with him. Instead of calling him back the next day to smooth things over, I'd let the silence settle between us until it hardened into something neither of us seemed to know how to break.
Lily was already in her pajamas when I got home, sitting cross-legged on the babysitter's lap with a coloring book, and the second she saw me she scrambled up and ran across the room.
"Mommy! Is the hockey man coming to play again?"
I crouched down to her level, brushing a strand of hair off her forehead, buying myself a second before I had to answer.
"Not tonight, baby."
"But when?"
"I don't know yet." The honesty of it cost me something. "He's really busy right now. He has some big games."
"Is he still my dragon guard?"
"I think he'll always be your dragon guard." That much, at least, I could give her without lying.
She seemed satisfied with that, wandered back to her coloring, chattering to the babysitter about something involving a castle wall that apparently needed rebuilding. I lingered in the doorway longer than I needed to, watching her, feeling the full weight of what I'd allowed to happen.
I'd let my daughter become attached. Really attached—crayon-drawing, refrigerator-magnet, when's he coming back attached—to a man whose entire world was in the process of exploding into something none of us could predict the full extent of yet.
Now, after two days of silence that seemed to grow heavier by the hour, an old fear settled back into its familiar place, reinforcing everything I'd always believed about men whose lives were lived under bright lights.
Athletes couldn't be depended on. Not completely. Not for the long haul. Not when the thing they loved most demanded everything they had and then some.
I paid the sitter, got Lily fed, bathed, and tucked into bed with her stuffed dragon tucked beneath one arm. By the time I finally settled down onto the couch with a cup of tea that had long since gone cold, my phone still hadn't buzzed.
Maya called a little after nine.
"Okay," she said, without preamble, exactly the way our mother opened conversations. "Something's wrong. I can feel it through the phone."
"I'm fine."
"You're using your work voice. The one you use on families in the waiting room right before you tell them something they don't want to hear."
I closed my eyes, wrapping both hands around my room-temp mug.
"Nothing. Lily was asking about Luke, and I didn't know what to tell her."
Maya didn't know what had happened between Luke and me. Using Lily as an excuse to hide what was really bothering me made guilt settle a little deeper in my chest.
"Why do I feel like it's not just Lily who's asking about him?" Maya asked gently. "I think you miss him."
"No, I don't," I said, more sharply than I'd intended.
She fell quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had softened.
"I know there's something more going on between you and Luke..."
"Maya... how did you..."
She laughed quietly.
"How did I know? Dani, it's written all over you. A blind man could see the chemistry between the two of you. I didn't know why you chose not to tell me, so I respected that. But I can also tell something's wrong."
She paused.
"And if I had to guess... it's because of you."
I closed my eyes.
"Yeah," I admitted quietly. "I think I pushed him away. I got scared, and..."
The silence stretched between us before I finally spoke again.
"I haven't heard from Luke since this morning. One text. Before that it was barely anything since Tuesday."
"He's had a week, Dani. Bryan went behind his back to Coach. He's got reporters in his face every five minutes. His agent's probably blowing up his phone about contract stuff. It doesn't mean?—"
"I know all the reasons," I said, sharper than I meant to. "I've been telling myself all of them, all day. Doesn't change how it feels."
Maya was quiet for a second. When she spoke again, her voice had softened. "I get why this scares you. I do. But Dani, Luke is not Steven."
I flinched at the name, hadn't heard it out loud in months. "You don't know that for certain."