Chapter 2
JESS
My best friend, Anne, had been radiant since the day she finally told Liam about their son.
Not the kind of happy that came and went with a good day or a glass of wine — the kind that sat underneath everything else, steady, like she'd finally set down a weight she'd been carrying so long she'd forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight without it.
I'd watched the change happen from three hundred miles away at first, over the phone, in voice memos sent at midnight because she couldn't sleep and didn't want to keep it all to herself.
The secret she'd been holding alone for years — Finn's existence, who his father was, all of it — was finally out in the open, and something in her had unclenched that I wasn't sure had ever fully relaxed before.
Then I'd watched it in person, in her kitchen, in the easy way she and Liam moved around each other like two people who'd spent six years apart and were finally, fully on the same side of something.
Finn had something to do with that too. He and Justin had clicked the way kids that age clicked — instantly, completely, with no negotiation period — and watching the two of them together put an ache in my chest I hadn't fully let myself examine.
Justin had been an only child his whole life, by design, by my design, and I'd never worried about him being lonely exactly.
But there was something about watching him find his person that made me understand, in a way I hadn't before, what Anne must have felt watching Liam find his way back to both of them.
Getting pulled into Anne's new world was one thing. The men who came with it were another. The team. The roster of broad-shouldered, easy-grinning men who apparently came standard issue with professional hockey.
Anne had warned me — half-joking, half-not — that I'd meet plenty of them if I kept coming around, and I'd told her, completely sincerely, that none of that was on my radar.
I had a young son, a full-time job that didn't leave room for nonsense, and exactly zero interest in dating a man whose entire life ran on a schedule built around someone else's playoff bracket.
I believed that, right up until the moment I didn't.
It started with Game 1 of the Finals.
Anne had called me the week before, breathless in a way I hadn't heard from her in years.
Liam wants Finn there for this one — wants him in the building.
And Finn insisted Justin come too. Apparently watching the Stanley Cup Finals alone is, and I quote, "no fun without my best friend.
" And then, almost as an afterthought, like she'd been saving it for last: Obviously you're coming too.
I'd said yes before she finished the sentence — for Justin, mostly, because he'd been talking about hockey for weeks and lit up at the mention of Finn's name, but also because, if I was honest, I'd missed her. The kind of missing that didn't go away with phone calls.
Then, because Anne cannot help herself, she'd pivoted to the other thing she'd clearly been wanting to bring up for months.
"So," she'd said, in the elaborately casual voice she used right before she meddled. "Now that you'll actually be around. You know Liam plays with a whole roster of very handsome, very single professional athletes."
"Anne."
"I'm just saying. You know there's an entire team of them, right?" She was laughing now, not even pretending. "Wait till you see these guys in person. You might change your whole stance on men."
"I have a very settled stance on men, Anne. Especially hockey players. Especially hockey players who are, what, twelve?"
"They are not twelve."
"They're children, Anne. Beautiful enormous children with no body fat and no problems. I'm thirty-seven years old.
I have a mortgage and a six-year-old and a job where people's lives depend on me not making mistakes.
The last thing I need is some twenty-six-year-old athlete who thinks a serious relationship is texting back within the hour. "
"Sure you do."
"I do. It's settled. I'm not interested."
"Uh-huh." I could hear her grinning through the phone. "Just come. You'll see what I mean."
I hung up smiling, but the truth underneath the joke was one I'd stopped bothering to explain to people, because nobody ever believed it.
I wasn't performing the not interested. I meant it, all the way down.
And it had nothing to do with the men being too young, or too anything.
It was simpler than that, and harder for people to hear: I had done the dating.
The apps, the setups, the endless coffees with perfectly nice men that went perfectly nowhere.
And somewhere in the last couple of years, without any heartbreak to point to, I had just — stopped. Not because I was sad. Because my life was already full, and I didn’t want to disrupt it.
Because I'd looked at my life one ordinary evening — Justin asleep down the hall, a job I was good at, a home I'd built with my own two hands and no one's help — and understood that it was already full.
Not waiting to be completed. Not missing a piece.
Full. And the idea of cracking all of that back open, of making room, of doing the exhausting work of fitting another whole person into a life that already fit me perfectly, held exactly zero appeal.
People heard single mother, thirty-seven and assumed there was a hole in me shaped like a man. There wasn't. That was the part they could never quite take in. I hadn't given up on anything. I'd simply arrived somewhere good and decided to stay there.
So no. I wasn't going to change my stance on men. I was going to go watch some hockey, hug my best friend, let my son lose his mind over a live game, and come home to the settled, complete, entirely sufficient life I'd chosen on purpose.
That was the plan, anyway.
It was Justin's first real road trip — not a quick drive to his grandmother's, but a genuine, hours-long, state-line-crossing trip — and he'd been counting down the days with the specific intensity only a small boy could bring to anticipation.
What he hadn't quite grasped was how long five hours actually felt from the back seat of a sedan.
I'd kept him talking about hockey almost the entire way, partly because he wanted to and partly because it was the only thing that worked better than a screen.
He had Opinions, most of them secondhand from a classmate whose dad had played college hockey, and he delivered each one like he'd discovered it himself.
"Icing is when you shoot it all the way down the ice without anybody touching it," he informed me, somewhere around hour three. "Tyler's dad told him that. Tyler told me."
"Got it."
"And offsides is when you go over the blue line before the puck does. That's illegal."
"Also got it."
"I'm gonna meet a real hockey player today, Mom. A real one. Liam. He plays for the Blaze."
"You are."
"What if he doesn't like me?"
"He's going to like you. Trust me."
He'd thought about that for exactly four seconds before moving on to whether the stadium would have the good kind of pretzels, and I'd let myself relax into the rhythm of him, grateful, the way I often was, for how easily he moved through the world.
Anne and Liam were waiting for us outside the team hotel when we pulled in, and even from the car I could see it — the way Liam's whole body turned toward her the second she laughed at something, the way Anne kept finding small reasons to touch his arm like she still couldn't quite believe she was allowed to.
Six years of distance, and they stood together like none of it had ever happened.
I'd seen my best friend happy before. I hadn't seen her like this.
Justin was out of the car before I'd fully parked, Finn already running to meet him, and the two of them collided into a hug that only small boys could pull off without any self-consciousness at all.
Liam shook my hand with the easy warmth of someone who already felt like family by proxy.
"The famous Liam O'Connell," I said. "I've heard everything."
"Good things, I hope."
"Mostly." He grinned, unbothered, and crouched a little toward Justin. "And I hear you've got some thoughts on hockey."
"I know about icing," Justin said immediately, with the gravity of a man delivering classified information.
"Is that right."
"And offsides."
"Impressive." Liam looked genuinely delighted, and I felt something in my chest loosen at how easily he'd slipped into being exactly the kind of person Anne deserved.
That's when his teammate joined us — tall, sandy-haired, jogging the last few steps over with the kind of loose, unhurried energy of a guy who'd never once worried about making an entrance.
"Carter," Liam said. "This is Jess, Anne's best friend from Chicago. And this," he put a hand on Justin's shoulder, "is Justin. Resident hockey expert."
Carter crouched down to Justin's eye level without missing a beat and held out his hand for a high five, which Justin slapped with his entire body weight behind it.
"Resident expert, huh?" Carter said. "What's my number? Gotta make sure you can find me on the ice tonight."
Justin's face fell, briefly devastated by the gap in his own scouting report. "I don't know."
"Nine," Carter said. "Easy to remember. Just watch for the fastest guy out there — that's me."
Liam made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. "Don't let him hear me say this, but he's not wrong."
"I heard that, by the way."
"I know. I said it loud on purpose."
Justin, for his part, had stopped listening to either of them, already murmuring "nine, nine, nine" to himself like he was committing it to permanent memory. He was, as far as I could tell, completely sold.
I caught Carter's eye over the top of Justin's head, and he gave me a small, easy smile — nothing pointed about it, nothing that asked for anything back — before Liam was steering us all toward the arena and the moment passed.