13. Ryan
RYAN
I was awake before she was. That was the first thing. The quality of pre-dawn quiet in a house that had another person breathing in it, different from my usual silence in a way I couldn’t have articulated but felt immediately and relaxed at the thought.
I lay still. Her head was against my shoulder, her hair spread across the pillow, one hand curled loosely against my ribs.
I’d slept better than I had in months, which meant I’d also been awake earlier than I wanted to be, lying there in the navy blue before sunrise being more aware of her than was probably wise.
She woke slowly. I felt it. The slight change in her breathing, the shift of her weight, the moment she became conscious of where she was. I kept my eyes closed and waited.
I knew what was coming. It was almost expected.
The recalibration of the morning after, the brain reassembling everything and deciding what to do with it.
I’d done it myself enough times to recognize the stillness before she assembled the previous night’s events into something manageable. Her body stiffened.
I gave her thirty seconds. Maybe forty. Then I tightened my arm around her, pulling her against me.
“Stop,” I said. Eyes still closed.
She inhaled sharply. “Stop what.”
“Whatever you’re doing in your head right now.” The wheels were turning and the tension in her body was palpable. That was Maren. Her silences had texture and this one was a brick wall she was putting up. “I can feel you thinking.”
I opened my eyes.
She opened her mouth.
“Maren.” It was a warning tone. I turned my head to look at her. She was watching me with the expression she wore when she’d been caught doing something she hadn’t meant to do. “Stay where you are. I’ll make some coffee.”
She held my gaze. Her expression changed. Not much, just enough.
“Okay,” she said, then let out a breath.
“Okay, good.” I pressed my lips to her hair, brief and certain, and then I got up to find the coffee.
I found it on the second try.
The first cabinet held cereal and a truly impressive collection of protein bars.
The second held mugs, a French press, and a bag of dark roast with a receipt tucked inside from a place in Tempe I’d never been.
I filled the kettle, set it on the burner, and stood in Maren Callahan’s kitchen at six-fifteen in the morning with some feelings I didn’t have an immediate name for.
Not regret. Nowhere close to regret. An emotion that settled quietly, like belonging. I was comfortable rooting around her kitchen for coffee supplies, as if I’d always been there.
I scanned while the water heated. Her kitchen was small and deliberately organized.
Spices in alphabetical order on a narrow rack beside the stove, a row of succulents on the windowsill above the sink, each one in a different terra cotta pot.
The corkboard above the breakfast bar held a postcard from somewhere coastal, a takeout menu with items circled in red, a photo of her and Griffin at what appeared to be a baseball game, both of them squinting into the sun.
Griffin had his arm around her and was laughing at something off-camera.
She was facing the camera with the expression she made when she was trying not to smile and losing, particularly with her brother.
I had seen that expression a lot in the last two months.
The kettle began to steam. I found the sugar in the third cabinet, next to a box of chamomile tea and a bottle of mezcal with about two fingers left and made two cups.
I was staring at the succulents and thinking about the night before, all of it, in vivid and unhelpful detail, when I heard her door.
She appeared in the hallway in an oversized T-shirt that hit her mid-thigh, her hair down, eyes still soft with sleep. She stopped when she saw me. A brief recalibration crossed her face, there and gone, and then she smiled, easy and warm.
I knew that smile. It wasn’t quite the one she’d been wearing at two in the morning.
“You made coffee,” she said.
“Found it eventually. Second cabinet.”
She held me in her stare for a moment, then at the French press sitting on the counter, then back at me.
She pressed her lips together and crossed to the counter, then picked up the mug I’d left for her.
She took a sip, and I watched her face do the thing it did when something was better than expected.
“It’s good.”
“I know how to make coffee.”
She watched me over the rim. “I didn’t expect that.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know.” A small smile.
She studied me for a beat, the dry assessment I’d learned meant she was making a decision. I waited. I was good at waiting.
“Morning skate?” she asked.
“Seven-thirty.”
She nodded, wrapping both hands around the mug.
She turned to the window at the Scottsdale morning, which was already bright and orange at the edges, promising another day of heat.
She was doing the casual thing. I could see the effort of it, barely, but there, in the way her shoulders were set just slightly too deliberately, the way she was facing the window instead of me.
I recognized the posture. It was the same one I wore to press conferences when a question landed somewhere tender and I needed thirty seconds to decide how to answer.
I could call it. Tell her I saw what she was doing, that she didn’t have to perform indifference for my benefit.
That I’d woken up at five-fifty and played with her hair and ran my fingertips along her ribcage for twenty minutes before I made myself get up, and I hadn’t wanted to get up.
I wasn’t going to pretend the previous eight hours had been nothing because the morning light made it complicated.
I didn’t say any of that.
I picked up my own mug and leaned back against the counter. “Have you always alphabetized your spices?”
She blinked. “What?”
I nodded at the rack beside the stove. “Alphabetical. Allspice through turmeric.”
She studied the rack a beat too long, her eyes going unfocused on a memory she hadn’t touched in years. “My mom does it that way.”
“Does she also have four succulents on the kitchen windowsill?”
“Seven, actually. Mom goes big.” She was watching me now, the calculated casual starting to give way to an emotion less performed. “You were doing inventory on my kitchen?”
“I was waiting for the water to boil.”
“That takes three minutes.”
“I’m observant.”
She studied me for a long moment. She’d stopped deciding what face to put on. I held it and didn’t do anything with it except be there.
“You don’t have to stay,” she said. “You have skate.”
“I have an hour.”
“Ryan—”
“I’ll make breakfast if you have anything.” I set my mug down and turned toward the refrigerator. “Do you have anything to eat?”
“I have everything,” she said, from behind me. The careful casual had gone out of her voice. What was left was quieter and more real.
She was quiet for a beat. I opened the refrigerator. Leftover pad thai, a lime that had seen better days, eggs on the second shelf.
“Good.” I took them out. “Scrambled or fried?”
She paused. “Scrambled.”
I found a pan.
She sat at the breakfast bar and drank her coffee and watched me move around her kitchen.
I could feel her watching but didn’t make it a thing.
I asked if she wanted cheese—yes. I asked about the postcard on the corkboard.
Turned out Griffin had sent it from a road trip to Vancouver two years ago, which was very Griffin, sending a physical postcard from a hockey road trip like it was 1987.
She laughed and the last of the deliberate casualness went out of her.
I put a plate in front of her and picked up my mug and she ate and I watched the morning come through her kitchen window and let myself feel it all. I was going to have a hard time leaving this house.
At six-fifty I rinsed both of our plates while she refilled her coffee. I checked my phone. Thirty minutes.
“So,” she said, from behind me. Her voice had changed. The easy warmth from the postcard conversation was still there but underneath it something careful had crept in. “About last night.”
I turned around, giving her my full attention. Her body language was closed off; she was getting ready to give me the morning after blow-off, and I wasn’t having it. Nope.
She was standing at the breakfast bar with both hands around her mug, wearing the expression she wore when she was organizing her thoughts before a difficult conversation. I’d watched her use it on Griffin twice at Sunday dinners.
“Don’t,” I said.
She blinked. “I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You were about to tell me it was a mistake.”
“I was going to say—”
“Maren.” I set my phone down on the counter. “Please don’t make this nothing.”
Her lips pressed together, and she was quiet for a moment.
I waited, which cost me more than I would have admitted, because I couldn’t read her for a second and that was not a state I was comfortable with.
Her eyes went to her coffee, to the corkboard, and finally back to me.
Whatever she’d been working through had landed somewhere honest.
“I’m not trying to make it nothing,” she said. “I just want to be realistic.”
“About?” Slight panic settled in my gut. I didn’t understand what she meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. This could not be the last or only time for us. Absolutely not.
She set her mug down. “About what this looks like. From the outside.” She crossed her arms, not defensively.
She pressed one palm flat against her own ribs and held it there.
“I’m the Director of Sports Medicine for this team.
I worked hard for years to be taken seriously in this space.
I’m young for this kind of job; the job of a lifetime.
Actually seriously, not just oh she’s good for a woman or she’s great with the soft tissue stuff, let the real doctors handle the rest. I earned that position and I need people to see that. ”
I was listening.