Chapter 38
Penny Correa POV
The salt air off the Gulf of Maine tasted of kelp, wet granite, and the stinging iron bite of winter.
Inside the weathered cedar saltbox cottage at the end of Ocean Avenue, the cast-iron woodstove ticked with steady, dry heat, its small glass window glowing with the orange embers of split birch logs.
The quiet in the room was vast and clean, broken only by the rhythmic, concussive boom of Atlantic breakers crashing against the icy rocks forty yards below the bluff.
Twenty-one days remained until the ECAC Championship in Lake Placid.
I stood by the front bay window in a pair of thick wool socks and an oversized cream knit cardigan that fell past my mid-thigh, holding a steaming ceramic mug of peppermint tea between both hands.
Beneath the heavy knit of my cardigan, my left hand rested flat, motionless and protective, over the lower curve of my abdomen.
For two weeks, this isolated bluff had been my sanctuary. I had forced myself to drink broth, forced myself to walk the snowy pine perimeter every morning, learning how to breathe without the suffocating roar of four thousand fans or the toxic politics of the athletic department.
I had built a quiet fortress for the tiny life taking root beneath my ribs.
Then the sound of heavy tires grinding through packed gravel shattered the peace of the coast.
My breath caught in a sharp, dry rasp.
Down the narrow, unplowed lane cutting through the scrub pines, a black pickup truck with New York plates rolled to a stop in the driveway.
The vehicle was caked in dried road salt and gray slush, its front grille coated in road grime from three hundred miles of interstate highway. The diesel engine sputtered, then cut out, leaving white steam hissing from the hood into the freezing Atlantic mist.
The driver’s side door swung open.
My heart slammed against my breastbone with a violent, terrifying jolt that turned my fingertips to ice.
Justin stepped down onto the gravel.
* * *
He wasn't wearing a winter coat.
In ten-degree ocean air, he wore only a black waffle-knit thermal shirt soaked through with freezing road spray, dark work pants splattered with mud, and unlaced combat boots.
His six-foot-four frame, which had always occupied space with the terrifying, arrogant dominance of an enforcer, looked hollowed out, as if the marrow had been scraped from his bones.
His dark hair was plastered to his forehead in wet clumps, his cheekbones sharp and skeletal beneath ten days of ragged black stubble. His eyes were bloodshot, sunken deep into bruised purple sockets, the split on his lower lip a jagged, crusted seam.
He looked ruined. An animal that had run itself half to death through the snow to find where it had been wounded.
My hands began to tremble.
The ceramic mug threatened to slip from my fingers. I set it down on the pine windowsill with a sharp, hollow click, my fingers immediately curling into the thick wool of my cardigan, pulling the heavy fabric tightly across my stomach.
I stepped away from the glass, walked to the heavy timber front door, and pushed it open.
The covered porch smelled of damp cedar shingles, salt spray, and winter frost.
I didn't step down the stairs. I stood at the threshold, my back straight, my chin lifted at that familiar, unbending angle, my hazel eyes cold as quarry slate.
Justin stopped at the base of the three wooden porch steps.
The freezing mist swirled around his bare forearms, the skin goosebumped and gray with cold, but he didn't shiver. His gaze lifted, locking onto my face with a desperate, wild hunger so raw, so stripped of defense, that it hit my throat like a physical blow.
"Penny," he rasped.
The voice was destroyed. A cracked, bleeding blade that barely carried over the roar of the surf.
I didn't yell. I didn't scream at him for the memorandum he had thrown at my chest. I didn't demand to know how he had found me.
I armed myself in the most devastating defense I possessed: absolute, polite indifference.
"You're trespassing on private property, Justin," I said, my voice level, crisp, and quiet, without a microscopic tremor to betray the war behind my ribs. "Turn the truck around and leave."
The words hit him like a blindside check on open ice.
His chest stopped moving. The breath left his lungs in a ragged, shuddering gasp that formed a cloud of white vapor between our faces.
He looked at my eyes, searching for the anger, searching for the tears, searching for the girl who had wept in his truck on Cumberland Avenue.
Finding only an impenetrable wall of ice, the last shred of athletic pride in his body collapsed.
"Penny, please," he whispered, his vocal cords tearing on the words, his bloodshot eyes swimming with a sudden rush of burning tears. "Don't look at me like that. Please."
"I don't have anything to say to you," I said, holding his gaze without blinking. "You made your position clear in the tunnel. You told me I was your biggest mistake, and you ordered me out of your life. I obeyed. Go back to your rink."
* * *
Justin didn't argue. He didn't offer an excuse. He didn't step up the stairs to crowd my space or use his massive frame to intimidate the silence.
His knees gave out.
Two hundred and twenty-eight pounds of conditioned, impact-hardened athlete dropped straight down.
His kneecaps slammed into the freezing, wet wooden porch boards with a sickening, violent thud that shook the railings.
He fell to his knees in the slush, right at the base of my boots.
He didn't put his hands out to steady himself. He let his broad, calloused palms rest flat, open and trembling, on the icy cedar boards, his massive shoulders bowing forward until his dark head hung beneath my eyeline.
The freezing drizzle coated his bare neck, snow melting into his dark eyelashes, but he didn't move.
He knelt in the dirt like a man awaiting an executioner's axe.
"I know what I did," he choked out, the words dragged up from the bottom of his shattered chest, raw, ruined, and completely stripped of pride.
"I know what I said to you in that underpass.
I was terrified, Penny. I had five years of poison in my head, and I let a forged piece of paper turn me into a monster. "
A single, scalding tear broke from his lashes, dripping onto the wet wood between his open hands.
"I didn't come here to ask you to forgive me," he rasped, his voice breaking on a dry, suffocating sob as he lifted his face to look up at me. "I don't deserve your forgiveness. I don't deserve to breathe the same air you breathe."
He reached into the pocket of his soaked thermal shirt, pulling out a folded piece of paper stamped with the blue seal of the Dean of Athletics.
With shaking, bloodless fingers, he laid the document on the top step at the toe of my wool sock.
"Garrett Shaw is expelled," he whispered, his chest heaving in shallow, ragged bursts against the cold.
"His father’s booster accounts are frozen under a criminal fraud indictment.
Wade Kozak is facing state extortion charges.
Dean Sterling signed the unconditional exoneration this morning, and Vance submitted your sole endorsement for the Vanderveer Fellowship. "
I stared down at the blue seal on the paper, my throat closing on a knot of sharp, agonizing pressure.
"I left my Bruins contract on Sterling’s desk, Penny," Justin said, his voice dropping into a quiet, broken vibration that shook with an agony so profound it stole the remaining air from my lungs.
"I gave up the signing bonus. I told Raymond Cole to tear up my draft rights.
I don't care about Boston. I don't care about the championship.
I don't care if I ever touch a sheet of ice again. "
He looked up at me through the rain, his face ravaged by grief, his dark eyes bared down to the bedrock of his soul.
"I will stay on these boards in the freezing snow until my blood turns to ice," he whispered, each word a plea from a dying man.
"You can tell me to leave, and I will freeze to death in your driveway.
You can tell me how to bleed for you, and I will spend the rest of my life on my knees earning back one minute of your trust. Just don't look at me like I'm a stranger, Penny.
Please... don't let me drown in the dark. "
The silence of the Atlantic coast collapsed over the porch, broken only by the crashing surf and the sound of his ragged breathing.
I stood above him on the threshold, looking down at the titan who had ruled Garrison athletics, kneeling broken and ruined in the freezing slush.
My hand moved beneath my cream cardigan, my fingers tightening over the fragile, secret warmth of my lower abdomen.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.
The past was dead. The lies were burned to ash.
And looking down at the father of my child shivering on the wet boards, the ice around my heart began to crack.