Chapter 6 #3
I drop my duffel bag by the front door and kick off my shoes.
The sound echoes faintly through the entryway.
The road trip wasn't particularly long, but hotel rooms always make me appreciate being home, even when home is mostly expensive furniture, black-and-white photographs, and a silence I chose on purpose.
I walk into the kitchen and open the refrigerator.
A bottle of hot sauce.
Half a carton of eggs.
Energy drinks.
Three different condiments.
A lemon that may or may not be older than some NHL rookies.
I close the door, then open it again, as if the contents might have improved through shame. They have not.
“Fantastic.”
The fridge remains unsympathetic.
I pull out my phone and open a delivery app. Chinese. Pizza. Thai. Burgers. The usual rotation.
At thirty years old, my cooking skills remain embarrassingly limited. I can make ramen. I can make grilled cheese. I can cook eggs without accidentally poisoning myself. Anything beyond that requires instructions and a level of commitment I generally don't possess.
Most people learn somewhere along the way.
Parents teach them. They help in the kitchen.
They grow up watching meals come together from ingredients that seemed useless on their own.
They learn which pan to use, how high to set the heat, how to season without thinking about it, how to feed themselves in a way that feels less like maintenance and more like care.
That never happened for me. It was always just me and Dad. At least as far back as I can remember.
My mother died the day I was born.
Complications during delivery. The story changed depending on who was telling it, but the basic facts stayed the same.
She went into labor, delivered a healthy baby, and then began bleeding too heavily afterward.
Postpartum hemorrhage, my grandfather eventually called it, though Dad never used words that clinical.
The doctors tried medication. They tried transfusions.
They took her back for emergency surgery when the bleeding wouldn't stop.
By the time they controlled it, her body had already lost too much.
She died in a hospital bed before she ever got to hold me properly.
I was a large baby, apparently. Broad-shouldered even then, which sounds impossible until you see pictures of my father. The delivery had been difficult. There were tears, surgical repair, too much blood, too much panic.
My grandfather explained it to me once in the calm, gentle voice he used when he knew I needed the truth but also needed not to be destroyed by it.
“Your mother died because medicine failed her, Ashford. Not because of you.”
I was fifteen when he said it. Fifteen, angry, already taller than most grown men, and still young enough to want badly to believe him. Fifteen years later, I remember every word.
The problem wasn't understanding it logically.
Logic had never been the issue. I knew babies didn't choose to be born.
I knew newborns didn't reach into the world and decide who lived or died.
I knew, in the cleanest part of my mind, that a hemorrhage was a medical emergency and not a moral verdict.
My father never let it stay that clean. He never let me forget what happened.
Not directly at first. When I was little, it showed up in small ways.
The way he looked at me sometimes when he thought I wasn't paying attention.
The way his voice changed whenever somebody mentioned her.
The photographs that disappeared from the house one by one until there were almost none left.
The tension that settled over every conversation about family, as if my mother were a ghost neither of us was allowed to mourn in the same room.
As I got older, the resentment became harder to hide.
By the time I reached middle school, it wasn't hidden at all.
Every argument somehow found its way back to her. Every disappointment, every failure, every bad grade, every broken dish, every late practice pickup, every bad day that had nothing to do with me and somehow ended at my feet. The message stayed the same.
If I hadn't been born, she'd still be alive.
Kids are stupid. They believe things, especially when those things come from the people who are supposed to love them.
I believed it for a long time. Part of me probably still does.
I toss my phone onto the counter and lean against it as the delivery app waits open and ignored. The screen eventually dims. My reflection appears faintly in the black glass of the microwave across from me, and for a second I see myself at sixteen instead of thirty.
Already six-foot-three but still bracing every time Dad walked into a room.
The memory arrives the way bad memories always do, without manners and without warning. Dad screaming in the kitchen. Me screaming back. A chair knocked over. Something breaking against the wall. The sound sharp enough that I still remember it better than the words.
I remember his face.
Not anger but hatred.
Real hatred.
The kind a person usually reserves for enemies, not sons.
The worst part wasn't that he hit me. By then, getting hit had become part of the weather in that house. Bad storms came through, did damage, and eventually passed. The worst part was realizing I had gotten big enough to stop him.
Hockey had changed my body. Years of skating, lifting, checking, and fighting for space in corners had packed muscle onto my frame. One day I looked up and realized I wasn't a scared kid anymore. I could hit back. I could win.
That realization should have felt empowering. Instead, it felt awful. Because once I wasn't afraid of him, all that remained was the understanding that my father hated me.
The final fight happened my senior year.
I don't remember what started it. Most of our fights blur together now, a long chain of slammed doors, raised voices, and old grief wearing new clothes.
I remember yelling. I remember him shoving me.
I remember shoving him back. I remember the moment we both realized I was stronger.
The silence afterward was worse than the fight.
He looked at me like he was seeing a stranger.
I left that night.
My mother's father picked me up.
I still remember his truck pulling into the driveway. Still remember throwing clothes into a garbage bag because I didn't own a suitcase. Still remember waiting on the porch in the dark, not because I hoped Dad would stop me, but because I hoped he wouldn't.
He never came outside.
The old man barely reached my shoulder, but somehow he always seemed larger than everyone else in the room. He took one look at me, one look at the garbage bag in my hand, and said, “Let's go home.”
Home.
Not my home.
Not his house.
Home.
My throat tightened unexpectedly, and I scrubbed a hand over my face as if that would do anything useful.
Grandpa had been kind in a way I didn't know adults could be.
Patient. Steady. The kind of man who never raised his voice because he didn't need to.
He taught me how to change a tire, how to balance a checkbook, and how to make the perfect grilled cheese.
He came to every hockey game he could. He never missed a birthday.
Never forgot a phone call. Never made me feel like a burden.
The problem was that by seventeen, most of the damage had already been done.
You don't spend your entire childhood hearing you're responsible for your mother's death and walk away unaffected just because someone finally starts being kind. Kindness helps. It matters. It gives you somewhere safe to stand while you bleed.
It does not erase the wound.
By the time I moved into my grandfather's house, part of me had already accepted the verdict.
Worthless.
Broken.
Wrong.
The beliefs became quieter over the years. Less obvious. Better dressed. They learned how to hide beneath discipline, control, hockey, sex, dominance, and all the other things people mistake for confidence when they're looking from a distance.
Even now, they still surface sometimes. Insecurity just learns better hiding places as you get older.
My phone buzzes against the counter. The sound pulls me back into the present so sharply that I blink. I glance down automatically.
Unknown Number
Hey it's Hayes.
A smile appears before I can stop it. The timing is almost ridiculous, like the universe decided I'd spent enough time standing in my kitchen with ghosts. Another message arrives immediately.
Kai
I stare at the screen. The smile grows.
Apparently, he couldn't wait long enough for me to figure that out on my own.
For a moment, I only look at the messages.
Simple.
Nothing special.
Two texts.
That should be all they are.
Instead, something in my chest feels lighter.
The condo doesn't seem quite as empty anymore.
I pick up my phone. My thumbs hover over the screen for a second before I type.
Crazy of you to assume I didn't know who Hayes was.
The typing bubble appears instantly.