26. Maren
MAREN
I changed out of my work clothe, pulling on an old T-shirt and shorts and went outside.
The back patio was my favorite part of the house.
I’d bought it partly for this. The wide flagstone, the low wall, the scrubland stretching out behind it with the mountains in the distance going purple in the afternoon heat.
I put my feet up on the wall and my phone face-down on the table beside me and stayed there, doing nothing, which I was terrible at and which I needed badly.
The desert had an atmosphere in the early afternoon I’d been trying to describe my whole life.
The way the light went flat and white and the shadows got sharp and the air had a dry weight to it that pressed down without being unpleasant, like the world was asking you to slow down and you had no choice but to comply.
I’d grown up with it and moved away briefly for school and come back, and every time I sat in it I understood again why I’d come back.
There was something clarifying about a landscape that offered no illusions.
The desert was exactly what it was. I’d always respected that.
A hawk was circling over the scrubland. Lazy, riding the wind with absolute confidence. I watched it for a while.
The past week had been one of the stranger ones of my adult life.
Not the worst. I’d had worse. But this week had the grinding exhaustion of caring enormously about multiple things simultaneously and being unable to do anything about any of them.
I’d been professional at work and composed at home and privately furious at everyone including myself, and I was tired.
I was tired of being the person who held it together in every room I walked into.
I picked up my phone and opened my texts with Griffin.
Maren: Have you talked to him yet?
The three dots appeared almost immediately.
Griffin: No. I will.
Griffin: You okay?
I sat with that for a moment. The fact that he asked. The fact that after everything, the treatment room door, the things said and unsaid, the apology that had landed quietly and stayed, we were still, underneath all of it, us.
Maren: Not really.
Maren: Working on it
My phone buzzed again. Paige this time, not Griffin. A voice note, fifteen seconds, which meant Paige had been thinking about me on her way somewhere.
I played the message. Paige’s voice came through dry and warm. “Checking in. No pressure. Just—I’m here if you need to debrief or drink wine or both simultaneously. Also your succulents on my Instagram got forty-seven likes and I think you’re more popular than you know. Okay. Love you. Bye.”
The comfort of being known by someone who had been paying attention for fifteen years and was not going to stop reminded me how lucky I was to have her in my life after all these years.
I typed back.
Maren: I know. Thank you.
My phone buzzed once more. Jenna this time, which surprised me—we’d only known each other a few months, still in the stage of friendship where you weren’t sure yet whether you were allowed to check in uninvited.
Jenna: Hey. Heard through the world’s least subtle organization that things are a little hard right now. No pressure at all. But I make excellent coffee and I know approximately zero people in this city so if you need somewhere to be that isn’t alone, I’m around.
I read it twice. Not “let me know if you need anything” but a real offer from someone who understood what it meant to be somewhere new with no history yet.
I typed back that I was going to take her up on that.
Jenna: Good. Thursday?
Maren: Thursday.
My phone buzzed again a few minutes later. Jeez. I am popular. Griffin, picking the thread back up where we’d left it.
Griffin: For what it’s worth. I was never actually mad at you.
Griffin: I was mad at the situation. And at myself a little for not seeing it.
Griffin: I felt stupid.
Maren: You were a little mad at me
Griffin: No…
Griffin: Okay yes a little.
Griffin: You really couldn’t have told me?
Maren: Would you have been cool about it?
He took longer than usual to respond.
Griffin: No.
Griffin: But still!
Maren: I know. I’m sorry.
Griffin: I know you are. We’re good Mare.
Griffin: You should talk to your guy
I put the phone down.
Talk to your guy.
I’d sent him a couple messages the night it happened, after I left his apartment, while I was still shaking.
Maren: I need a few days. It’s not about us.
Maren: This team is in its first year. It’s the whole city’s second chance and millions of dollars and a locker room that’s barely a team yet, and the first thing to crack is you and my brother. Because of me. Because of what we did.
Maren: I’m not going to be the reason it comes apart before it gets off the ground. I think we need to take some space and really think about that and what we want.
Ryan: I know what I want and I’m not going anywhere.
Ryan: I’m going to fix this.
He’d answered in under a minute, and then he’d done exactly what he said. He hadn’t gone anywhere. He just hadn’t crowded me either.
I’d been holding the line with my guy for over a week. Not to punish him. Not to make him suffer or wait or prove anything. I believed his apology. I believed the Swedish text and the keychain and every one of the days he’d kept showing up in my phone. I wasn’t pulling back because I doubted him.
I was pulling back because of what I’d done to him.
I’d watched Griffin’s face change in Ryan’s kitchen, watched a friendship that predated me crack down the middle, and I understood with total clarity that I had done that.
This team was four months old. Two hundred million dollars of someone else’s money, a city that had been burned once and was deciding whether to believe in hockey again, a room full of men learning how to be a team in their first season—and the first real fracture in it ran straight down the middle of the captain and his best friend.
Because I’d slept with one of them in secret for months.
The most fragile, most important thing any of these people had built, and I was the crack in it.
So I’d made the only decision that felt like setting something right.
I’d taken myself out of the middle of it.
Handed his care to Jade, given him room, stepped back far enough that he could repair the thing that mattered without me in the frame making it harder.
It was the responsible thing. The mature thing.
The thing a person did when she loved someone enough to stop costing them.
That was the story I told myself on the patio, watching the hawk hold itself motionless against the wind. That this was generosity. That I was giving him something.
Underneath it was an older, quieter thing I’d carried so long I’d stopped hearing it.
A man like Ryan would come to his senses about a woman like me the moment she cost him something real.
Better to step back while it was still my choice than to stand there and watch him do the math and land where everyone landed eventually.
Better to want less now than to be taught to want less all over again.
But I couldn’t put away the the longest string of texts he’d sent all week the night before.
Ryan: I can’t sleep when you’re not here. I keep reaching over.
Ryan: I miss the way you argue with the TV.
Ryan: I miss your cold feet.
Ryan: I miss you telling me I’m wrong about books.
Ryan: I miss you so fucking much, Maren. I’m going to fix this, baby.
I teared up and sent a reply.
Maren: I miss you too.
Maren: I just think we need a little time. You’ve got games that matter and I don’t want to be the thing pulling your head out of them.
I’d read it four times before I put the phone down. He hadn’t pushed. He’d just left it there, the truth of it, and let me do what I was going to do with it.
The space was starting to feel like a room I’d accidentally locked myself into.
I picked up my phone again and opened Ryan’s messages.
I hadn’t been ignoring them exactly. I’d read every one, usually within thirty seconds of receiving them.
I’d answered him twice—once to tell him I needed time, once to tell him I missed him too and meant it—and both times I’d made myself stop there, because saying more meant giving ground I wasn’t ready to give. But I’d read every one. All of them.
What struck me, going through them now in the late afternoon quiet, was what they weren’t.
They weren’t escalating. They weren’t increasingly desperate or pointed.
None of the subtle pressure I’d learned to recognize from Josh, the texts that were technically innocuous but carried an undertow of why aren’t you answering, what does this mean, are you punishing me.
Ryan’s texts didn’t have an undertone. They were him. His feelings and nothing more.
The first few were simple. Thinking about you.
Hope today was okay. Let me know if you need anything.
He’d heard what I said, accepted it, and decided accepting my space didn’t mean vanishing from it.
Then they’d gotten slightly longer, slightly more personal.
He’d told me about practice, about a conversation with Eli, about a call with his dad that had gone differently than expected.
Not asking for anything. Just telling me things, keeping the thread of us alive on his end while I figured out what I wanted to do with mine.
Josh, given six days of a woman pulling back, would have sent thirty texts in the first forty-eight hours and then gone cold.
And the silence would have been louder than the texts had been.
The silence would have been a statement.
An accusation. I would have spent those six days managing his reaction to my needing space rather than having it.
And when he finally did reach out it would have been careful, pointed.
Designed to make me feel guilty for needing the thing I’d needed.