Chapter 2
Catherine Celia
When my parents told me we were moving to Dallas, I hated them for about three days.
Not in a real way, and not in the kind of way that lasted, but in the dramatic, seventeen-year-old way where every feeling seemed enormous and every change felt like betrayal.
I had a life in Pittsburgh. I had friends, teachers who knew me, a school where people had stopped seeing me as only Cole Davis’s daughter, and a bedroom I had painted pale blue when I was twelve and refused to change because some part of me liked that it still looked younger than I felt.
Pittsburgh had always been home to me. Then Daddy took the job with the Dallas Blaze.
Everyone acted like it was the most incredible news.
Of course, it was. My father had retired from playing hockey, and instead of stepping away from the game that had shaped his whole life, he had been given a chance to stay in it as the head coach of an NHL team.
It was a huge opportunity. The kind of offer men spent years hoping for.
It meant he could take everything he had learned on the ice and pour it into players from behind the bench.
I understood what it meant to him. I saw it in the way he looked when he told us, like he was trying to stay calm but couldn’t quite hide the pride in his eyes.
I saw it in the way he kept glancing at Mom, as if he needed her to tell him it was okay to want it.
And Mom did, because that was who she was.
Mom had spent years chasing her own dream too.
When I was growing up, she was on the path to becoming a doctor, moving through pre-med and then medical school with a level of discipline that was impressive.
Some of my earliest memories were of Mom at the kitchen table late at night, surrounded by textbooks and highlighters, her hair twisted up messily while she studied after everyone else had gone to sleep.
I looked up to both of my parents. They were determined, loving, and committed.
Daddy showed me commitment through hockey.
Mom showed me commitment through medicine.
Between the two of them, I learned early that anything worth having asked something from you.
Still, understanding why we had to leave did not make it hurt less.
I was almost seventeen, with junior and senior year still ahead of me, which meant I was old enough to feel like I should have a say and young enough to have absolutely none.
So, we moved to Dallas, and I smiled when I was supposed to smile, nodded when adults told me it would be an adventure, and then went to my new school feeling like I had been dropped into the middle of a movie where everyone else already knew the script.
Starting a new school as a junior was miserable.
There was no instant best friend, no cute boy who noticed me across the cafeteria and saved me from loneliness, no neat little montage where I tried on outfits and found my place by Friday.
There were hallways full of people who already had histories together.
Lunch tables where every seat seemed claimed before I even walked in.
Teachers who were kind but didn’t know me.
Students who either ignored me completely or asked if my dad could get them tickets.
I had missed Pittsburgh so much it hurt.
But I also didn’t want to be unfair. Daddy was trying.
He was building something new, and every time he came home from the rink with that intense, exhausted look on his face, I knew he was giving the Blaze everything he had.
Mom was busy at work since she had taken on a position at the hospital in Dallas.
My parents were working hard, and I was old enough to understand that parents were people too, with careers and dreams and sacrifices of their own.
So, I did what I had always done. I became independent.
I studied and kept my grades up. I tried not to ask for too much.
I found things to fill the lonely spaces.
That was how I ended up babysitting Isla Russell.
At first, it was just something to do. I had free time because I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with social invitations, and Mom knew almost everyone connected to the team.
Hunter Russell needed help with his little girl sometimes, and somehow my name got passed along.
Isla was about three when I started, all dark hair, big hazel eyes, stubborn chin, and very strong opinions about bedtime.
And Hunter was a problem from the beginning. Not that he knew it.
He was twenty-six, a professional hockey player, and a single dad, with broad shoulders, tired eyes, and a quiet way of moving through the world like he had already survived more than most people knew.
He would come home from practice or a game, sometimes still in a suit, sometimes with his tie loosened and his hair damp, and the first thing he asked was never about the house or the time or whether Isla had behaved.
It was always, “How was she?”
I noticed the way his voice softened when he talked to her, the way Isla ran to him, the way he looked at that little girl like she was the only fixed point in a world that had once tried to knock him sideways.
I also noticed his forearms when he rolled up his sleeves, which was less noble of me.
I was seventeen, so I did the only sensible thing a seventeen-year-old girl with a crush on a completely unavailable man could do. I pretended I didn’t have one.
I babysat Isla, made her simple dinners, cleaned up toys, helped her into pajamas, answered Hunter’s questions politely, and made sure my eyes were on literally anything other than the way his shirt pulled across his chest when he bent to pick her up.
Then I graduated high school and ran back to Pittsburgh as fast as I could.
I told everyone it was because I had been accepted into a great pre-med program there, which was true.
The reality was that I wanted to go home, or at least to the place I thought home was.
The problem was that Pittsburgh did not feel the same once my family wasn’t there.
The streets were familiar. The campus buildings, the coffee shops, the cold air in October, all of it gave me the ache of recognition.
But the house I remembered belonged to another family.
My parents were in Dallas. Jaden and Mila were in Dallas.
Daddy’s job, Mom’s career, my siblings’ childhoods, the everyday life I thought I could return to, all of it had shifted south while I was trying to hold on to a version of home that no longer existed.
Pittsburgh was where I had been from. Dallas was where my family was.
It took me longer than I wanted to admit understanding the difference.
By the time I applied to medical school, Dallas made sense.
Dallas West Medical College had a strong program, and I wanted to be close to my parents.
I wanted to spend time with Jaden and Mila before they grew up completely without me.
I wanted to stop being the daughter and sister who came home for holidays and left again before anyone got used to having her there.
That had been the plan until I started med school and realized it was going to suck up all my time.
The first three years swallowed me whole.
Lectures, labs, exams, rotations, missed birthdays, half-written texts, too much coffee, and nights where I fell asleep with notes stuck to my cheek.
I lived in Dallas technically, but most of the time I barely saw anything beyond campus, the hospital, and the inside of my own exhausted brain.
Mom understood, of course. She had lived it.
Sometimes that made everything easier, and sometimes it made everything harder, because I had spent my whole life looking up to her discipline and drive. She had shown me that medicine was not glamorous. It was work. Constant, demanding, humbling work.
Daddy had shown me something else entirely. He had shown me what it meant to give your body and heart to a team. Sports medicine had always felt like the place where both halves of my life met.Mom’s medicine. Dad’s hockey.
So, when the opportunity came to begin a sports medicine elective with the Dallas Blaze, I wanted it before anyone had finished explaining the details.
I was entering my fourth year now, finally, and the elective would begin in the summer around development camps, preseason medical testing, physicals, and training preparation.
I would shadow the team physicians, observe injury evaluations and rehab cases, and help with supervised research and medical documentation.
And because I apparently had a deep personal allergy to free time, I had also been offered the chance to work on a research project which would look good for my residency applications, which meant I would stay connected to the Blaze through the first semester until Christmas.
It was the Fourth of July, and for once I was not wearing scrubs, not carrying a hospital badge, not trying to impress an attending, and not counting the hours until I had to be somewhere else.
I was just CC, Cole and Holland’s oldest daughter, home at the ranch for a barbecue.
I wore a short white dress because Mom had texted me that morning and told me to wear something cute and not my depressing study clothes.
I put on platform sandals because I liked the extra height, and I left my hair down even though the Texas heat made that decision questionable.
When I came downstairs, Mom looked up from the kitchen island and smiled like she had been waiting all day just to see my face.
“There she is,” she said.
Something in my chest went soft. “Here I am.”
“You look beautiful,” she said, giving me that mom smile that was so filled with love.
“Thanks, Mom.”