Chapter 16 #2
"I've watched the two of you together. Actually watched, not just heard about it secondhand.
That man cares about you and Lily." Maya's voice was steady, the way it got when she really wanted something to land.
"I've watched how he looks at you when he thinks nobody's paying attention.
I've watched him with Lily—the way he gets down on the floor and actually plays with her instead of putting on a show for the adults.
Steven never once got down on the floor with anybody.
He barely stayed in a room long enough to sit. "
"Luke's about to become one of the most talked-about players in the league. That kind of success changes people."
"Maybe,” Maya replied. “Or maybe it just means he's drowning in a week nobody could have prepared him for, and he's not handling the juggling act as gracefully as either of you would like.
" A pause. "Talk to him. Actually talk, not the flat texting you're both apparently doing right now.
You're punishing him for something he might not even realize he's done. "
I didn't have an answer for that one that didn't sound defensive, so I let the silence sit for a moment instead.
"I love you," Maya said softly. "I want this to work for you. Both of you. Just don't build the wall so high that he never gets a chance to prove that he can climb it."
We hung up a few minutes later and I sat there a long time with her words turning over in my head, feeling the pull of two opposite instincts—the part of me that wanted to believe her completely, and the part that had learned, hard and early, exactly how much safer it was to expect the worst before the worst had a chance to arrive on its own.
I set the phone on the nightstand and stared out the window at the night sky.
Luke finally texted, apologizing and asking if we could talk. I knew he was trying, but I was too exhausted and guarded to let the conversation happen. I told him not tonight, then turned my phone facedown, hating how relieved and disappointed I felt at the same time.
Somewhere in that staring, without fully deciding to, I made a choice. Quiet, private, the kind of decision that didn't need to be spoken out loud to be real.
I was going to take Lily and go. I didn't even need to wait that long. My contract included an early-release clause. If I asked, the agency could end the assignment and find me another placement. I’d never considered using it before.
I'd always been the nurse who finished what she started, no matter how hard the rotation got. Now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I was going to use it now.
Somewhere new. Somewhere far enough that a hockey schedule couldn't follow us there even by accident—the West Coast, maybe, anywhere the Leopards weren't a name anyone recognized.
Somewhere that didn't come with the particular vertigo of loving someone whose entire life belonged, first and always, to something bigger than either of us.
My contract had an end date. So did this. Except I was the one who got to decide when.
It felt like betrayal even thinking it, given everything Luke had said to me Monday night across that candlelit table, given the way his hand had felt over mine, warm and certain.
But it also felt like the only way I knew how to protect the thing that mattered more than any of it—the small girl asleep down the hall, who had already started drawing pictures of a man who might not still be in either of our lives by autumn.
I couldn’t sleep. I lay there a long time, mind circling the same loop it always circled at midnight, replaying every version of how stupid I'd been to let this go as far as it had.
To let myself want something this badly again, after I'd spent five years building a life specifically designed not to need anyone.
Around one, Lily's door creaked open, and small feet padded across the hallway.
"Mommy." Her voice was thin, scared in the particular way that meant a bad dream, not a real emergency. "Can I come in?"
"Come here, baby." I pulled back the covers, and she scrambled up beside me, curling into my side the way she'd done since she was small enough to fit in one arm.
"What happened, sweetheart?"
"I had a bad dream." Her voice was muffled against my shoulder.
"We were on a boat. A little one. In the middle of the ocean, and it was really big and dark, and the boat didn't have a sail or anything to make it go, and we were just stuck there.
Just floating and floating and nobody could find us. "
I pulled her closer, pressing a kiss to the top of her head, feeling her heartbeat slow gradually against my ribs.
"You're safe," I told her. "We're not stuck anywhere. We're right here, at home, and I've got you."
"Was the hockey man on the boat too?"
The question caught me off guard, small and unbearably specific. "No, baby. Just us."
"Oh." She sounded disappointed by that, in the vague, half-asleep way children were disappointed by things they didn't fully understand yet. "I wanted him on the boat. He could've helped us row."
I held her until her breathing evened out completely, until the small, worried tension in her shoulders finally let go and she went heavy and warm against my side, fully asleep.
I lay awake a long time after that, staring at the same ceiling, Lily's dream turning over in my mind long after she'd stopped needing me to hold it for her.
A boat with no sail. No way to move it forward, no way to steer it anywhere at all, just drifting in something too big to see the edges of.
I thought about Monday night, the way Luke had looked at me across that table, certain and unafraid, telling me he wanted all of it—me, Lily, the whole complicated shape of us.
I thought about Tuesday night’s phone call, both of us too tired and too raw to be careful with each other.
I thought about the newsstand headlines, and the crayon drawing on my refrigerator, and Maya's voice insisting that Luke wasn't the man I kept bracing myself for him to be.
Somewhere in the tangle of all of it, drifting toward sleep myself at last, I understood that Lily's dream wasn't really about a boat at all.
It was exactly how I felt. Adrift somewhere too vast to navigate alone, no clear direction forward, and no idea yet whether the thing I wanted most was a lifeline or just another wave about to pull us further out.