Chapter 18
Logan
Jasmine is still asleep when I open my eyes. The bedroom is cold and pale with early morning light. She's on her side, facing me, her hair fanned across the white pillow. One hand is tucked under her cheek.
I lie still and look at her. Her eyelashes are long against her cheeks. There's a small crease between her eyebrows that she gets when she's dreaming. I've learned this about her over the past few weeks. She talks in her sleep too, fragments of sentences that don't make sense.
I ease out of bed without disturbing her, pull on sweats and a thermal, and pad downstairs barefoot. The fire burned out overnight, and the living room smells like cold ash.
Through the windows, the ocean is flat and silver under a low sky. Fog sits heavy on the water, so thick I can't see the horizon. It hugs the coastline and spills across the rocks and creeps up the lawn toward the porch.
I make coffee in the kitchen. The machine gurgles and fills the room with the smell of dark roast. I pour a cup, black, and take it to the porch.
The cold is immediate. It seeps through my sweats and wraps around my bare feet on the wooden boards. I sit in the Adirondack chair facing the water and hold the hot mug with both hands. The fog is so close I could reach out and touch it.
This is why I bought this house. Coffee on the porch, fog on the water, silence thick enough to swallow in. This house is the only place I've ever been fully myself.
I drink my coffee and watch the fog. After twenty minutes, it starts to thin. The water appears in pieces — a patch of silver here, a dark line of rock there.
The back door opens behind me. Jasmine steps onto the porch in my sweatshirt, which hangs past her thighs, and a pair of wool socks she must have found in my drawer.
Her hair is wild from sleep. “Morning,” she says.
“Morning.”
She sits in the chair beside me and tucks her feet under her. We drink our coffee and don't talk. The fog continues to lift. A pair of seabirds appears, gliding low over the water, dipping and rising.
“This is the most peaceful place I've ever been,” she says after a while.
“That's why I come here.”
“How do you leave?”
“It gets harder every time.”
She leans her head against the back of the chair and closes her eyes. The cold has turned her cheeks pink. She looks small in my sweatshirt.
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
“Very.”
I go inside and cook breakfast. Eggs scrambled, thick-cut bacon, sourdough toast with butter. I slice avocado and arrange everything on two plates. Jasmine comes inside while I'm cooking and perches on the barstool at the island with her coffee, watching me.
I set the plates on the island and sit beside her.
“Last night you told me how it felt when I left.” I turn my coffee mug in my hands. “You deserve to hear my side.”
She nods.
“When I got drafted, my father sat me down at the kitchen table. He'd written out a five-year plan for my career. Every month was accounted for.
“He told me that the next five years would determine the rest of my career.
That the guys who make it in the NHL are the ones who eliminate distractions.
That there would be time for everything else after I'd established myself. It sounded so logical. He was presenting a business case for why I should walk away from you.”
“And you agreed.”
“I was eighteen, Jasmine. He was my father. He'd coached me since I was four years old. Every good thing I'd achieved in hockey came through his guidance. When he told me something, I believed it. I didn't have the tools to question him. I didn't even know questioning him was an option.”
“I get that,” she says.
I take a long breath. “My mother was worse because she was subtle. She never said anything directly negative about you. She just framed you as a category — girls, distractions, things that interfere with the plan.”
“And to my face, she said I wasn't built for the hockey life.”
“I didn't know she said that until you told me. My mother is careful about what she says in front of me versus what she says when I'm not in the room.”
“I know. I've experienced it.”
We're quiet for a minute.
“The night before I left for New York, I sat in my car outside your house for forty minutes,” I confess. “Your bedroom light was on. I picked up my phone at least a dozen times. I typed messages and deleted them. I almost got out of the car and knocked on your door.”
“Why didn't you?”
“Because I'd already told my father I would go. And in my family, once you commit to a course of action, you don't reverse it. You make a decision, and you live with it.”
“That's not strength, Logan. That's stubbornness.”
“I know that now. I didn't know it at eighteen.”
She sets her mug on the counter. “What was it like? After you left.”
“Bad. The guys on the team were older, and they didn't care about some rookie from Long Island.” I stare at the countertop.
“I cried once. Then I channeled everything into hockey.
Every feeling, every regret, every time I thought about you — I put it on the ice.
I trained harder and stayed later at practice.
My coaches thought I was the most dedicated rookie they'd ever seen. I wasn't dedicated.”
Jasmine nods.
“ I was running from the fact that I'd made the worst decision of my life, and I was too proud and scared to undo it.”
She reaches across the island and takes my hand.
“I followed your career,” I say. “I'd search your name once in a while. When you passed the bar, I found the announcement online. When you joined Caldwell Price & Associates, I read about it on their website. I needed to know that what I did didn't break you.”
“It didn't break me.”
“I’m glad,” I say. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we lost out on a decade with each other, and it’s my fault.”
We sit at the island and hold hands across the butcher block countertop. The morning light has shifted from gray to pale gold. The fog outside is almost gone. The ocean is blue now, deep and bright, and the waves catch the sunlight.
“My parents' voices are still in my head. I've been living inside their system for twenty-eight years, and I don't know how to dismantle it overnight.” It’s a painful admission to make, but I owe it to Jasmine to be honest.
“I'm not asking you to dismantle it overnight.
I'm asking you to choose me when it counts.
Not every time. Not over your family in every situation.
But when your mother makes a comment about me or your father tells you that I'm a distraction, I need you to push back.
I need to know that you'll stand beside me, not behind them.”
“I will.”
We spend the rest of Sunday on the beach. The fog has cleared, and the sun is out, low and bright over the water. The air is cold, but the wind has died down. We walk the coastline for an hour, stepping over rocks and tide pools.
Jasmine finds a piece of sea glass, pale green, worn smooth by the waves. She puts it in her jacket pocket.
“Where would you travel if you could go anywhere?” I ask.
“Italy first. Then Japan. Somewhere warm with incredible food and no cell service.”
“I had the best sushi of my life in Vancouver. Cole recommended this tiny place near the waterfront. No menu, you just eat whatever the chef makes. I went back the next day.”
“You went to a restaurant two days in a row?” she asks with a laugh.
I’ve missed hearing her laugh. “It was that good.”
She's quiet for a few steps, then she says, “Can I put books in your study?”
“There are already books in the study.”
“They're half empty, Logan. Three walls of built-in shelves, and they're half empty. That's a crime.”
“I haven't had time to fill them.”
“I have boxes of books in storage that I've been meaning to unpack since I moved into my apartment two years ago. Let me bring them.”
“Bring them all.”
She stops walking. “You'd let me put my books in your house?”
“Jasmine, I'd let you knock down a wall if you asked.”
She laughs and takes my arm, and we keep walking.
By late afternoon, we start packing up. The house is quiet and clean. I wash the breakfast dishes, and Jasmine folds the blankets, and we move around each other in the easy, coordinated way of two people who have spent a weekend learning each other's rhythms.
I lock the front door and stand on the porch for a minute. The ocean is gold in the late afternoon light. The rocks are dark. The air smells like salt and pine.
Jasmine comes up beside me and slides her hand into mine.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” she says.
“Thank you for coming.”
The cab arrives, and we load our bags and drive to the airport. The flight home is smooth. Jasmine falls asleep against my shoulder ten minutes after takeoff. Her hand rests on my thigh. Her breathing is slow and deep.
I look out the window at the coastline disappearing below us. Maine shrinks to a thin line of green and gray between the ocean and the clouds. The house is down there somewhere, empty now, locked up, waiting for us to come back.
We're going home. Soon, I’ll take Jasmine to my parents' house for dinner. I'm going to sit at that table and tell my parents that the woman beside me is the woman I love and that their approval, while welcome, is not required.
My father wrote a five-year plan in a notebook when I was eighteen. Relationships can wait, he wrote.
He was wrong.