25. Ryan
RYAN
I got to the facility early.
Not unusual. I was almost always the first one in, the one who liked the building before it filled up, before the noise and the equipment and the charged energy of forty people preparing their bodies for something that mattered.
I liked the quiet of it. The facility at six-thirty in the morning smelled like rubber and cold air and the faint antiseptic underneath everything, and it was mine, briefly, before the day claimed it.
I’d told myself I wasn’t coming in early because of Maren.
But I was absolutely coming in early because of Maren.
I changed into my training gear and headed down the hallway toward the treatment rooms, and my pulse picked up somewhere around the second door.
The aliveness of knowing I was about to be in the same space as her, even if that space was a treatment table and she was being professional and careful.
I’d take careful. I’d take whatever version of her I could get right now.
I knocked on the treatment room door.
“Come in.”
Not her voice.
I pushed the door open. Jade. One of the associate trainers, who had been working with the defensive prospects all season, knew her stuff well enough. But she wasn’t Maren. She kept her eyes on the supply table, professional and ready.
Where is Maren?
“Hey, Ryan,” she said. Not Mr. Lindqvist. Not a stranger. Just Jade, who Maren had clearly called that morning and told exactly what she needed covered. “Ready to get started? I’ve got your shoulder notes.”
I stood in the doorway for a moment longer than I should have.
“Uh… Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
I got on the table and let Jade work through the protocol.
The shoulder was nearly there, another week and I’d be fully cleared, which should have been the only thing on my mind.
Instead I stared at the ceiling and thought about Maren somewhere else in this building, or maybe at home, and the fact that she had made this decision before I’d even arrived. To avoid me.
I thought about the texts I’d sent last night. The Swedish at the end. Jag vill fortj?na din k?rlek. How it had felt necessary and true when I’d sent it, sitting on my couch in the quiet after she’d left, needing her to have something. Needing her to know I meant it.
On the table, with Jade working on my shoulder and Maren somewhere she’d made sure wasn’t here, I made myself think it through instead of just feeling it.
She wasn’t angry. If she were angry she’d have said so, to my face, in detail.
She ran straight at conflict. Mostly. This was the opposite.
This was quiet, and arranged, and done before I’d walked in the door.
She’d called Jade that morning and handed off my care like a clean professional decision, and the only reason to make it look that clean was to keep me from arguing with it.
So it wasn’t anger. It was retreat, and I’d spent months watching her retreat in smaller ways—the careful pace she set, the way she acted like what we had was something borrowed, like she was waiting for it to expire.
Maren didn’t pull back from things she didn’t want.
She pulled back from things she’d decided weren’t hers to keep.
I thought about the flat way she’d say she’d gotten good at wanting less, like it was a skill she was proud of surviving.
Two years with a man who talked about himself across every dinner and let other women hang on his arm while she sat there learning to take up less space.
Josh hadn’t broken her down with anything dramatic.
He’d done it slowly, by making her believe that needing things made her a burden, and she’d walked out of it carrying that like a fact about herself instead of a lie he’d handed her.
I wanted ten minutes alone with the piece of shit who taught her that.
Because that was what this was. She’d looked at the wreck we’d made with Griffin, the rift we’d torn through her own family, the thing she’d been most afraid of from the start, and she’d reached the conclusion she’d been trained to reach.
That she was the cost. That the cleanest thing she could do for me was take herself out of the equation before I figured out she wasn’t worth it.
She thought she was the price. She thought stepping back was a kindness.
Almost a week since Griffin walked out, and I’d spent every one of them being careful and measured and quiet, giving her room, and the room had let her arrive at exactly the wrong conclusion with no one there to argue the truth.
I stared at the ceiling and let myself know the thing I’d been filing since September. Since before September. Since the day we met. When our connection began. It was undeniable.
She’d been eighteen. I’d been twenty-two.
She’d stood at the edge of Jensen’s pond in the dark in my sweatshirt and whispered the words “nothing appropriate” back to me like she knew exactly what I meant, because she had.
I’d held the line because of Griffin, because of the draft, because I thought I was doing the noble thing and I’d get over it.
I could recognize the thing I was feeling without acting on it.
I’d told myself it was the right call. I’d moved on.
I’d been with other people and none of it had been dishonest, but underneath every single one of them was a reference point I’d never named.
A standard I’d been measuring against without letting myself know that’s what I was doing. Until now.
Then she’d walked into the brand new Sidewinders arena just like all of us and the file had just opened. Like it had been waiting. Like some part of me had always known it was going to.
I’d thought of her as mine before she knew it. The only thing that had changed was that now she knew it too.
I was lying on this table with someone else’s hands on my shoulder, and Maren was somewhere else, and I’d let it get here. It was my fault.
Texts were not action. Words were not movement. And Maren, who had spent two years with someone asshole who was very good at saying the right thing and very bad at being the right person, knew the difference better than anyone.
I exhaled slowly through my nose.
Jade paused. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Keep going.”
She kept going. I stared at the ceiling and thought about Griffin’s apartment and what time I’d show up tonight, and whether ready or not ready was even the right frame anymore, and what exactly I was going to say when I got there.
By the time I laced up my skates, I had the beginning of a plan.
Whether the plan survived practice was another question entirely.
Calloway had us running structure from the drop.
Zone entries, breakout patterns, the defensive zone coverage we’d been tightening for three weeks.
Crisp, technical work that required communication between every line and every pair, work that fell apart immediately when the captain and the starting goalie were operating on different frequencies.
It wasn’t obvious to the casual observer.
The drills ran. The pucks moved. But I’d played enough hockey to know the difference between a team working and a team performing the motions of working, and what was happening on this ice was the second thing.
I could feel it in the half-second delays.
The passes that came slightly late, the positioning that was right but wasn’t instinctive, the way my own reads were running a beat slow because part of my brain was occupied with things that had nothing to do with zone entries.
Griffin made every save. He was too good not to.
But the warmth was gone. The easy communication of two men who’d been reading each other since September, and for years in our twenties, the shorthand that meant I could throw a look across the ice and Griffin would already be moving.
That was gone, replaced by something functional and cold, and the whole first line felt it.
Theo recalibrated his positioning three times in twenty minutes.
Cole was playing too tight, too careful, trying to compensate for a foundation that kept shifting underneath him.
Twenty minutes in, Calloway blew his whistle.
Not the short tweet that meant stop and regroup. The long, sustained blast that meant everyone to center ice. Right fucking now.
We gathered. I read the temperature of the group. The collective awareness of what was coming, the way thirty bodies arranged themselves slightly differently when a reckoning was incoming.
Calloway stood at the blue line. Arms crossed. Clipboard at his side. He had a way of reading a room that made every person in it feel purposefully included, and he used it now, his gaze moving across the group and stopping nowhere for too long but making contact with everyone.
“I’m going to say this once,” he said. His voice was conversational, which was somehow worse than if he’d raised it and just chewed us all out for sucking today.
“Whatever is happening in this locker room, or outside this arena, I don’t know what it is and I’m not asking.
That’s your business.” He paused. “But the moment it shows up on my ice, it becomes my business. And right now it is very much on my ice.” Another pause.
“We are this close to a playoff berth. This fucking close!” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together with almost no space between them.
“In this franchise’s first season. Do you understand what that means?
Do you understand what that would mean for this city, for this organization, for every one of you?
” He let that sit. “I don’t care if someone said something they can’t take back.
I don’t care what happened off the ice. In here, you are professionals, and professionals do not bring their personal situations onto the ice and cost their teammates what we have worked this entire season to earn.
” His gaze settled on me for a moment. Then Griffin. Then the group again. “We clear?”
The ice was quiet.