Epilogue Peyton
Two weeks is not long enough to become someone new. It is long enough to stop pretending.
I know this because I am standing in Susan McAllister’s kitchen at seven in the morning, and nobody has asked me why.
It is not the porch light Dad—he keeps correcting me when I say Bill—leaves on now like it belongs to me too. It is not the chipped blue mug Lily assigned me without ceremony, the one that has quietly become mine. It is the way nobody makes a thing of it.
Susan is at the table, moving slower than she’d like, a rehab worksheet folded under her coffee like she believes no one will notice her ignoring it. She catches me noticing.
“Don’t,” she says.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You reported it with your face.”
I sit across from her. “Occupational hazard.”
She almost smiles. Two weeks ago I watched a clinician put a hand over his mouth in a hallway. Now she is stealing extra sugar when she thinks I am not looking, running the room from a kitchen chair the way she once ran it from a hospital bed. I have decided not to mention the sugar.
The Westwood piece ran ten days ago. The other story—the hockey one, the one with my disclosure high and my name where no one could use it against me—had already done its work.
The Westwood fallout hasn’t stopped—two more parents came forward, a district lawyer sent a letter that used the word regrettable four times and apologized for nothing.
Gil says Westwood is the best work I have done.
I think it might be the first honest thing I have published in two years.
Nobody’s byline is doing me any favors, and for once that feels like proof I got it right.
Ryan comes in from the cold with his hair damp and his bag already on his shoulder, because the season does not pause for anyone’s mother, and the drive back to San Antonio is long. He stops when he sees me at the table. He always stops, like the sight of me still surprises the plan out of him.
“You’re up,” he says.
“I’m always up. You’re just usually gone.”
“Working on it.” He kisses the top of Susan’s head, then mine, unhurried, in front of his family, in the full light of the kitchen, and does not manage it into something smaller.
He asked me to come home with him two weeks ago. I said okay. Most nights since, I have. Nobody has made me define it.
“Game Three is Thursday,” Lily announces from the doorway, wearing one of Ryan’s old jerseys as a dress. “Ryan’s gonna win the whole thing.”
“One series at a time,” Ryan says, which is the most captain thing a person can say at a breakfast table.
“Boring,” Emma decides.
“He’s right, though,” I say, and Ryan looks at me like I have handed him something. “You take the game in front of you. You don’t skate the whole postseason at once.”
“Look at that,” Dad says from the counter. “She’s learning the sport.”
“I understood the sport fine. I just refused to be nice about it in print.”
Susan laughs, then presses a hand to her chest and waves off the three of us who move toward her at once. “Sit. All of you. I survived open-heart surgery. I can survive a laugh.”
So we sit. We eat eggs Dad overcooked and toast the twins fought over. Ryan’s phone buzzes with the team’s travel schedule, the next hard days of a run that could go anywhere or end fast. Somewhere out there the playoffs are waiting to take another swing at all of us.
But that is Thursday’s problem. That is the next story.
I stay for one more cup of coffee.
Nobody asks me why.