Epilogue
Ryan
Six weeks later
The scar across my right hand was still pink.
It cut over my knuckles in a thin, crooked line, ending near the places where the surgeon inserted two pins to repair the bones I shattered against the lodge wall.
The pins were gone now. My cast came off nine days ago, and the brace beneath my jacket was supposed to remain there unless I was showering or working through the exercises my physical therapist gave me.
Milwaukee knew everything.
They knew I broke my hand less than an hour after signing their contract.
They knew the surgery ended my Frost season months before anyone expected it to.
Flint could’ve kept me under contract through the season while I completed rehabilitation from the sidelines, but Gloria, Coach Waters, Chris, and the organization agreed that trapping me between two teams benefited no one.
Flint granted me an early medical release. Milwaukee honored every term of the contract I signed and moved my reporting date forward so I could complete rehabilitation with the Inferno’s medical and development staff.
They had every contractual reason to reconsider taking me.
They didn’t.
Tyler, Milwaukee’s player-development coordinator, called three days after surgery and told me the Inferno still wanted me.
Their management spoke with Chris, Gloria, and the coaching staff in Flint.
By the time I returned from East Harlem, everyone had agreed I could complete the first stage of rehabilitation here before reporting early to Milwaukee.
Now the waiting was over.
My flight left in three hours.
The Sin Bin was closed for the night, but every light remained on.
Cade flipped the lock after the last customer left, Aura killed the music, and Bliss cleared every empty glass from our table even though neither of them was working.
We came here to drink, celebrate, and pretend tonight was anything except what it was.
A farewell waited beneath every conversation.
My bags were already in Cade’s truck. The apartment in Milwaukee was furnished, and Tyler stocked the refrigerator the day before.
He sent me fourteen pictures as proof because he didn’t trust me to feed myself.
I had a training schedule, a new physical therapist, a list of mandatory appointments, and a professional hockey organization prepared to build a future around the hand I broke trying to survive the night my other future ended.
Beneath my black shirt, the newest ink on my body had finally stopped burning.
The tattoo stretched across my left ribs in simple black script, close enough to my heart that every breath moved through it.
Encanto.
Charm.
The artist asked whether the word represented a place, a memory, or a person. I told him to mind his fucking business and finish the tattoo.
Nobody knew it existed.
I’d spent six weeks erasing every visible trace of Charm from my life.
Her belongings were gone from my apartment.
I unblocked her, then deleted her number because some pathetic part of me still wanted to know if she called.
I packed away the books I bought for her and gave them to Briggs because I couldn’t look at them without imagining her hands opening every cover.
Then I put her name into my skin where no one could see it.
It was the most honest thing I’d done since I forced her to say goodbye.
I didn’t get the tattoo because I believed we would find our way back to each other.
Hope had nothing to do with it. Charm belonged to the part of my life that changed the man I was, and leaving her didn’t mean I could pretend she’d never existed.
She reached places inside me no one else had found.
She loved me before I let El Cuchillo tore through everything we were, and I needed some part of her to remain with the man leaving Kimball Falls even if she never touched me again.
Six weeks of silence should’ve made it easier.
It hadn’t.
Charm hadn’t called. She hadn’t sent a message through Bliss or Aura, and Briggs’s phone no longer lit up with updates about whether she slept, ate, cried, or made it through another day without falling apart.
Her silence was different from mine. I used silence to make her feel the door closing.
She’d finally stopped knocking.
It didn’t hurt less now that her pain wasn’t constantly placed in front of me. I only didn’t have to watch it anymore. There was a difference, and I’d learned to hate it.
Rider spun the label on his beer without drinking it. Easton sat with one arm stretched across the back of Aura’s chair, his fingers resting against her shoulder. Bliss stayed close to Cade while Briggs occupied the seat beside mine.
Nobody had said much since I arrived because they were worried. Every motherfucker at the table was trying to hide it, and none of them was doing a good job.
“I’m moving to Milwaukee,” I said. “I’m not entering witness protection.”
Rider stopped turning the bottle. “Good to know. I was about to ask whether we’re allowed to keep pictures.”
“You don’t have any pictures of me.”
“I have hundreds.”
“That’s disturbing.”
“Most of them are shirtless.”
“That’s worse.”
A few smiles appeared around the table, but they didn’t last. Rider couldn’t drag us away from the reason we were there for longer than a few seconds.
Easton leaned forward. “We can drive out whenever you need us.”
“I know.”
“It isn’t far,” Cade added. “We already looked.”
“I know.”
Briggs watched my face. “You keep saying that.”
“Because you fuckers keep telling me things I know.”
“We’re making sure.”
“You’ve been making sure for six weeks.”
Briggs didn’t blink. “You broke four bones in your hand, drank enough mezcal to put yourself into a coma, disappeared to East Harlem, and came home three days later without telling any of us where you’d been. Excuse me if I’m still making fucking sure.”
The hospital confirmed the obvious that night: my hand was broken badly enough to require a specialist and surgery, but the specialist couldn’t see me until later that week.
I’d already fucked up every part of my life that mattered, and there was only one place I could think to go while I tried to make sense of it.
I went home.
To the only home I remembered having, and then I went to see my mother. What happened between us at her grave was nobody’s fucking business.
“I told you where I was going.”
“You told me after the plane landed.”
“I wasn’t asking permission.”
“No one said you needed permission.” His jaw flexed. “We needed to know you were alive.”
“I answered every time you called.”
“After I threatened to report you missing.”
“You’re dramatic.”
“And you’re an asshole.”
“That isn’t new.”
“No.” He wrapped one hand around his beer without lifting it. “This is.”
I looked away before he could find anything on my face that I didn’t want to explain.
The Sin Bin had never been quiet with all of us inside it. We filled this place with noise, shouting across tables, fighting over music, and breaking up arguments before someone lost teeth. We celebrated wins as if we would never lose again and survived losses by acting as though none of us cared.
Tonight, I could hear the refrigeration unit humming behind the bar.
My eyes moved through the room, finding the stool near the far end of the bar, the hallway beside the bathrooms, and the small table Charm used to claim whenever she came in with Bliss and Aura.
She was everywhere.
I’d seen her here for years before I was ready to approach her with intention.
I knew the sound of her laugh before I understood what made her cry.
I knew how she took her drinks, which songs made her sing beneath her breath, and that she always pushed her hair behind her ear before telling someone something she believed mattered.
The night I finally crossed the room, she sat at the bar wearing her worry with her mouth stained the color of dark cherries. She looked up when I stopped beside her, and the nervous smile she gave me made every carefully planned word disappear.
You are Kierkegaard.
I closed my eyes until the memory faded, but opening them only returned me to the room where every part of my life had collided.
Cade was watching me. Bliss held his hand beneath the table.
Aura had stopped pretending she wasn’t studying my face, and Easton’s fingers remained against her shoulder like he already sensed whatever was coming.
I couldn’t sit there anymore.
The chair scraped across the floor when I pushed away from the table and stood. Every person around it went still.
“I can’t do this here.”
Cade rose halfway. “Do what?”
“This.” I gestured toward the room with my good hand. “Sit inside every fucking memory and pretend leaving is only about hockey.”
Nobody answered.
I turned toward the bar and dragged a hand across my mouth.
“She’s in my apartment. She’s at the rink, the coffee shop, the Book Nook, and on every road between here and Flint.
She’s in this fucking bar even when I know she isn’t.
I see her in places she’s never been because I spent months imagining taking her there. ”
My voice started breaking, and I hated that I couldn’t stop it.
“I can’t breathe without running into some version of the life I thought we were going to have.
I can’t buy coffee without remembering what she ordered.
I can’t open a book without hearing her argue about the ending.
I can’t sleep in my own bed because I still wake up reaching for her, and every morning I have to remember all over again that she isn’t there. ”
Cade straightened completely. Briggs’s chair shifted behind me, but he didn’t approach.
“I can’t be Ryan here,” I said. “Ryan built a life in Kimball Falls. He let himself trust people. He fell in love with a woman who could reach every place he spent his life protecting, and he believed she would follow him anywhere.”
My good hand pressed against the new tattoo beneath my shirt.