9. AVA
AVA
Just Friends
Three rules for visiting the apartment of a man who got you pregnant and doesn't know it.
One: bring food, because showing up empty-handed makes it a date.
Two: bring the dog, because a chaperone with four legs and no filter is better than no chaperone at all.
Three: whatever you do, don't look at the wall to your left when you walk in.
I look at the wall.
My whole body flushes hot enough to fog the windows.
"Ava?"
I snap my attention to Kai, who is standing by the kitchen island in a t-shirt and joggers, watching me hover in his doorway like I've forgotten how doors work.
"Sorry. Your entryway has interesting proportions." I gesture vaguely at nothing. "Designer brain. Can't turn it off."
"You're critiquing my doorway?"
"Professionally, yes." I unclip Biscuit's leash. "This is Biscuit. Now, you’ve officially met. She bites strangers. You're technically a stranger, so hold still and let her decide."
Biscuit sniffs Kai's outstretched hand. Her ears flatten. One long, suspicious inhale. Then she sneezes directly onto his knuckles and trots into the living room.
"What does the sneeze mean?" Kai asks, washing his hand.
"She tolerates you. Don't let it go to your head."
Mira is on the couch with her laptop. She looks up, sees Biscuit commandeer the most expensive rug in the apartment, and grins at me.
I set the pastry box on the counter, keeping my eyes on the granite, the cabinets, the stove. Safe objects. Objects I have no history with.
My peripheral vision catches the hallway to the bedroom. I can feel the ghost of his hand on the zipper of my dress, pulling it down in the dark.
I unpack the pastries with more focus than the task requires.
Kai reaches for the pastry box. His hand moves past it, opens the wrong cabinet, stares at the mugs inside like he's never seen them.
"Plates are above the sink," Mira says without looking up.
He closes the cabinet, opens the one above the sink and takes out a plate. His jaw is tight.
"Since when are the plates above the sink?" he asks.
"Since three years ago," Mira says.
He puts a pastry on the plate without responding. But I see him glance at the cabinets like they've betrayed him.
I watch him open two more wrong drawers looking for a knife. He finds it on the third try and cuts the pastry with more force than a croissant requires.
"Kai."
"I'm fine."
He's not fine. He's standing in a kitchen he chose, arranged, and lived in for three years, and he can't find a knife. Every wrong drawer is a small humiliation he absorbs without comment.
Seeing him like this, lost in his own home, something in me softens.
I didn’t come here today with a plan.
But now I know what I need to do.
After we eat, Mira leaves for a meeting, and I start with the hall closet.
"What are you doing?" Kai asks.
"Helping."
"I didn't ask for help."
"You opened four wrong drawers. You need a system." I pull a shallow ceramic bowl from the closet shelf and set it on the entry table. "Keys go here. Every time. You walk in, keys go in the bowl. No thinking required."
He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. "You're reorganizing my apartment."
"I'm giving your brain fewer problems to solve." I move into the living room. "Where are your photos?"
"What photos?"
"Family photos. Anything from the last four years. Team pictures, holidays, birthdays."
He shrugs. "Mira might have some. There's a box somewhere."
"Find it."
He disappears into the guest room and comes back with a cardboard box. I open it on the coffee table. Framed photos, loose prints, a couple of team portraits.
I pick up the first one. Kai is at what looks like a championship celebration, hoisting a trophy, his face split open with the kind of joy that makes my throat ache. Confetti in his hair. Teammates piled around him.
He looks at it blankly. Like it's a photo of a stranger wearing his face.
"That goes on the mantle," I say softly.
I line them up. The championship. A family dinner where Laura is laughing and Charles has his arm around Kai's shoulder. Mira and Kai on what looks like a hiking trail. A team photo where everyone is in suits, Kai in the center with the captain's C on his chest.
Each one is a window into the years he can't reach. I arrange them chronologically, left to right, a visual timeline of the life his brain dropped.
"The idea is anchoring," I tell him. "You see these every day. Even if the memories don't come back, the context does. You start building a framework around the gap."
He stands beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat from his arm. His eyes move across the photos slowly.
"I look happy," he says.
"I’m sure you were."
"How do you know?"
I pick up the championship photo. His face in it is unguarded in a way I've only seen once before. The morning after, when he woke up holding me and didn't let go.
"Because I've seen what your face looks like when you're not performing. That's what this looks like."
His eyes shift to me. The weight of his attention makes my skin warm.
I take out the desk calendar that's in my bag and place it on the counter.
"Daily reminders. Appointments, therapy sessions, medications, anything you need to track. Update it every morning."
"You bought me a calendar."
"I bought you a system. The calendar is just the delivery mechanism." I uncap a pen. "What's on your schedule today?"
"Physical therapy at four and apparently having my apartment redesigned without my consent."
"You love it."
"I tolerate it." But the corner of his mouth lifts.
By the time I’m done, Kai is standing by the mantle staring at the championship photo I placed there a while back.
"We could try your phone," I say.
He looks at me.
"Your photos, your texts. Four years of conversations are sitting in that phone. Reading your own words might shake something loose."
He pulls the phone from his pocket and hands it to me like it's a grenade with the pin half out.
I sit on the couch. He sits beside me. I open his camera roll and scroll back.
There are hundreds of photos. The team on a bus. A sunset from what looks like a hotel balcony. A blurry shot of Wyatt asleep on a plane with marker drawings on his face.
"That one seems important," I say, tilting the screen.
"Wyatt would kill whoever did that."
"Whoever did that was probably you, captain."
His mouth twitches, but his eyes stay flat. He's looking at the photos the way you'd look at someone else's vacation slides.
I swipe further. A photo of Kai and Theo in suits at some formal event, both holding whiskey glasses. Kai's grinning. Theo's beard is shorter.
"Anything?"
"No."
A photo of Kai on the ice, mid-stride, the arena packed behind him. The C on his jersey is visible. The lighting is sharp, professional. His face is pure focus.
"That's a good photo of you," I say.
"It doesn't feel like me."
I scroll to his texts. I shouldn't be reading his private messages, but he handed me the phone and hasn't asked for it back.
I find a thread with someone named Coach B. I open it.
Dozens of messages. Strategy discussions, lineup questions, the occasional dry exchange that reads like two men who respect each other but would never say so.
One message from Kai, dated eight months before the accident, reads: I'll handle Wyatt. He listens when I don't yell.
"That sounds like you," I say softly.
Kai reads it over my shoulder. His breathing gets slower, more controlled.
I scroll down. A message from Kai to someone named Jordan.
Kai:
Thanks for covering that shift. I owe you one.
Jordan:
Damn right you do. I accept cash, alcohol, and introductions to hot women.
I glance at Kai.
“Jordan has a bit of a reputation,” he says.
“You remember that about him?”
“Don’t have to.” His voice turns clipped. “Five minutes around the guy tells you everything you need to know.”
He takes the phone from me and scrolls himself. His eyes move quickly across the screen at first, scanning, then slower, lingering. He stops on something. His thumb hovers.
"What is it?" I ask.
He turns the screen toward me. A text thread with his mother from two years ago.
Kai:
I think I'm ready to talk about what happened with Dad in Chicago. Not yet. But soon.
Laura:
Whenever you're ready, sweetheart. I'll be here.
"I have no idea what happened in Chicago," he says.
His voice is level. But his hand holding the phone has a tremor that has nothing to do with his injury.
"That's okay," I say. "You can ask your mom."
"I shouldn't have to ask my mother what happened in my own life."
The tremor spreads to his jaw. He locks it down, sets the phone on the cushion between us face-down.
"Kai..."
"I'm reading my own conversations like they're someone else's diary."
He's not looking at me. He's looking at the phone between us. "I wrote those words. I made that decision, and I can't feel any of it."
"That's what the exercises are for. We keep going and..."
He stands. The motion is sharp enough that Biscuit lifts her head from the rug.
"And what? Keep scrolling through my phone until I magically feel something? I read a message about Chicago that obviously mattered enough for me to bring it up to my mother, and it's just words on a screen. There's nothing behind them. No feeling, no context, nothing."
He walks to the window. His shoulders are rigid, hands shoved into his pockets.
"I'm not your patient, Ava."
"I never said you were."
"This is what you're treating me like. Exercises and systems and desk calendars. Like if you organize it well enough, my brain will cooperate. I’m not a broken thing you fix."
My chest contracts.
But I don't deflect his words with a joke or smooth things over.
I stay exactly where I am.
"Look at me."
He doesn't turn.
"Kai. Look at me."
He turns. His eyes are wet but nothing has fallen. His jaw is clenched so tight I can see the muscles working beneath his stubble.