18. Maren
MAREN
The building was quieter without them. It wasn’t my turn to travel with them, and because I had a fair amount of work to do in the arena, it wouldn’t be for some time.
I noticed it on the first morning. The absence of forty-plus men moving through the facility at once, the missing noise of skates on ice and sticks on boards and Cole Westbrook’s voice carrying down three hallways.
The traveling roster had left at six a.m.—the longest stretch of the season—and by eight the place had the hush of a school during summer break, everything still in use but missing its main purpose.
I didn’t mind it. I had four guys on the IR and a full week of rehab protocols to run, and quiet was easier to work in.
Jordan Holt was first up. Hip labrum, six weeks post-op, starting to test weight-bearing sequences. He was twenty-three and impatient in a way I’d come to expect from twenty-three-year-old athletes, which meant he needed watching or he’d push too hard and undo three weeks of careful progress.
“Range of motion first,” I told him, and he groaned with his whole body. Painfully reminiscent of Cole. “You do the work, you get back on the ice faster. You skip the work, I write a note to Calloway that says you’re not responding to protocol.”
Jordan did the work.
I moved through my morning at full speed, nothing dragging and nothing left sitting. Present, efficient, and satisfied. Patient assessments, progress notes, a call with the team physician about Jordan’s hip timeline. I ate lunch at my desk and answered emails and didn’t check my phone.
I checked my phone.
Nothing from Ryan yet. He’d landed in Calgary at noon local time, which meant he was probably already at the arena for the morning skate.
Nine days. Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Seattle, San Jose.
I’d checked. I knew his schedule the way I’d absorbed everything about him.
Through attention, through accumulation.
I put my phone face-down and went back to work.
The delivery arrived at two-fifteen.
The front desk called up to say there was a package for me, which was unusual. I didn’t usually get personal deliveries at the facility. I went down to collect it with the vague assumption it was the resistance bands I’d ordered from a supplier last week.
It was not resistance bands.
The box was small and white, tied with a thin black ribbon, a card tucked underneath. No return address. My name in his handwriting. Neat, spare, slightly architectural.
I stood at the front desk and stared at it for a moment.
“Good delivery?” the receptionist asked, not looking up from her computer.
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
I took it upstairs.
The card first. Four words in his handwriting. Don’t work too hard. And below that, in Swedish, two words. Alltid din.
I set the card down. Opened the box.
Inside, nested in tissue paper, was a thin gold bracelet.
Delicate, simple, the type of jewelry I could wear every day and forget I had on until someone asked about it.
I turned it over and found the engraving on the inside of the band.
Alltid din. The same two words pressed into the gold in small clean letters.
I sat down in my office chair.
Alltid din.
I pulled up my phone and typed it into the translation app carefully, letter by letter.
Always yours.
I put my phone down on the desk and turned the bracelet in my palm for a long time. It was delicate and serious at once. Not jewelry designed to be noticed, just a thin gold band with two words on the inside where only I would see them. Something I could wear every day until I forgot it was there.
He’d thought about the details. He’d thought about what I would want, what would suit me, what I’d still be wearing in five years. He’d thought about me.
Josh had never done anything thoughtful that was just for me. Everything was performative. The differences were striking and I wondered if maybe I had to have that shitty relationship to be able to recognize and accept the thoughtfulness of someone like Ryan.
I turned the bracelet for another long moment.
Then I put it on, turned my wrist in the light once, and went back to work.
Or tried to. I mostly sat there with my hand on the desk where I could see it and thought about a man in Calgary who had apparently decided to destroy me from two thousand miles away.
He texted me at seven.
Ryan: Did you get the package?
Maren: You should have warned me
Ryan: Where’s the fun in that?
Maren: I’m at my desk and the front desk definitely saw my face
Ryan: What about your beautiful face, solsken
Maren: I had on the face a person makes when they open a gift they weren’t expecting
Ryan: Good face or bad face
I turned the bracelet on my wrist. The gold caught the light from my desk lamp, warm and quiet and already feeling like it had always been there.
Maren: Good face. Really good face.
Ryan: Good
Maren: Alltid Din
Ryan: You looked it up
Maren: Obviously I looked it up. What does jag saknar dig redan mean?
Ryan: Look it up
Maren: RYAN
Ryan: You have a translation app. I have faith in you.
I typed the phonetic approximation I’d been working with for three days and got a result that was close enough.
I stared at my screen.
I already miss you.
He’d said that. At the facility, before he left, looking at me in the corridor with that steady certainty. Jag saknar dig redan. I hadn’t known what it meant and he’d known I didn’t know and he’d said it anyway.
Maren: You said that at the arena. Before you left.
Ryan: I know.
Maren: You knew I didn’t understand it
Ryan: I knew you would figure it out eventually.
Maren: That’s maddening
Ryan: Is it tho?
I looked at the bracelet, then at the translation still open on my phone, then at the ceiling of my office, where I’d been spending entirely too many hours this week.
Maren: No. Not really.
His response took a minute. Then a single word in Swedish I didn’t know and didn’t immediately look up, because I was starting to understand that he left me things to find in my own time, and I was starting to like it.
Ryan: Min
Maren: I know what that means too…
Ryan: Good. Don’t forget it while I’m gone.
Swoon.
The second delivery came on day three. Coffee from the place two blocks from the facility I’d mentioned once, in passing on a Sunday morning when we were still in bed and I was half asleep. The cup had a sleeve with my name on it and a note in that same spare handwriting. Have a beautiful day.
I stood in the facility lobby holding it and smiled like an idiot, and it had nothing to do with the coffee.
Day five brought flowers. Tulips, deep coral, a generous bunch with the clean unpretentious beauty of something Scandinavian.
I’d expected roses if I’d expected anything at all.
I hadn’t expected tulips, which was exactly the point.
The card. Calgary is cold. Even for me. You’re all I’m thinking about.
I put them on my desk where I could see them from my chair.
Day seven was a book.
I opened the package at my desk and went still when I saw what it was.
The second The Ashby Letters novel, hardcover, and when I turned it over and opened the front cover I found two signatures.
The author’s, dated two weeks ago. Below it, in Ryan’s handwriting.
I have one. You have two. Three comes out in thirteen months and we’ll get it together.
I laughed out loud in my empty office, alone, completely delighted, and sat there for a full minute holding it.
He had the first edition of book one on his shelf.
I’d seen it the first night I went to his apartment, noted it with the same quiet surprise I’d felt about everything in that space.
The books, the real kitchen, evidence that someone lived here and not just slept here.
He’d caught me looking and said nothing, just watched me take it in with that patience he had, like he had all the time in the world for me to figure things out.
Now I had book two. Signed. First edition.
Together we had a set.
I texted him a photo of the inscription and his response came back in under a minute.
Ryan: I may have called in a favor
Maren: You play hockey
Ryan: Hockey players know people
Maren: This is unhinged. All these gifts. You didn’t have to do all this.
Ryan: You love it
Maren: I don’t hate it.
Ryan: I take care of what’s mine.
I put my phone down. Picked it up. Put it down again.
Went to refill my water bottle and stood at the sink thinking about those two words and the register he said them in and the fact that there was still another day of this.
I was so giddy with the feelings I had for him I could’ve kicked my feet like a teenager.
Later that night, I watched the game at home alone.
Not because I’d planned to. I got home late from the facility, changed, stood in front of my refrigerator deciding between leftover carbonara and not bothering, and then sat on the couch with my phone and found the broadcast.
I knew hockey the way anyone raised by Tom Callahan knew hockey.
Not passively, not just as background noise.
I’d been watching game film with Griffin since I was old enough to sit still for it.
I knew a shift from a zone entry, could read a breakout pattern, understood the difference between a team playing its system and a team playing scared.
What I hadn’t ever done was watch with the involuntary attention I brought to it now, when number seventeen came over the boards for a shift and my whole body went slightly electric.
Ryan Lindqvist did not look like the same man who made me breakfast in the mornings.
He looked like the reason this franchise existed. He was energized. The center in every way.