Chapter 17
Meeting His Parents
Beck's parents lived forty minutes outside campus in a small blue house with a garden his mother tended obsessively, the kind of house that looked, from the outside, exactly like the picture of a happy, stable family Beck had grown up inside of and still, somehow, felt like a guest in sometimes.
"They're going to love you," Beck said, on the drive over in late March, hands tight on the wheel in a way that told Tessa this mattered to him more than his easy tone suggested.
"Fair warning, my mom's been asking about you since September.
I made the mistake of mentioning you once, in passing, and she's been building a whole file ever since. "
"What about your dad?"
"He'll like you too. He's just quieter about it. Takes him a while to warm up to anyone, always has. It's not about you specifically."
Diane and Robert Callahan turned out to be warm, unpretentious people, the kind who hugged a little too long and asked a little too many questions, clearly delighted to finally meet the girl their son had gone uncharacteristically quiet about for months.
"We've heard so much about you," Diane said, pulling Tessa into a hug at the door before either of them had said a word. "He doesn't usually talk about girls. Ever, actually. We were starting to wonder if he'd decided against the whole thing entirely."
"Mom."
"I'm just being honest, Beckett. It's a compliment to her, not an insult to you."
Over dinner — homemade, nothing from a jar, a fact Tessa noted with real approval — Diane asked careful, genuine questions about Tessa's family, and when the subject of Poppi came up, she reached across the table and squeezed Tessa's hand without making a whole production of the gesture.
"Loss like that reshapes a family," she said, simple and direct, no platitudes attached. "I'm sorry you're living through that on top of everything else."
"Thank you. Most people don't say it that plainly."
Later, doing dishes together while the men talked hockey in the other room, Diane grew quieter, more thoughtful. "He told you, I'm guessing. About the adoption."
"He did."
"We've always been honest with him about it, from the very beginning, no secrets, no big dramatic reveal at eighteen.
I sometimes wonder if that was the right call, though.
Whether knowing so plainly, so early, that he came to us instead of being born to us, made him hold a piece of himself back his whole life, waiting to see if we'd notice the difference.
" Diane set down the dish towel, something raw crossing her face.
"We love him completely. I need you to know that.
But I've watched him keep a careful distance from us his entire life, like he's still auditioning for a place that was always already his.
I don't know how to close that gap. I've tried for twenty years. "
"I don't think that's about you," Tessa said gently. "I think it's just the shape of the wound. He told me the same thing, almost word for word. He knows you love him. I don't think knowing and feeling it all the way through are the same thing yet, for him."
"No," Diane agreed, quiet. "I don't think they are. Maybe you'll be the one who finally closes that gap. He looks at you like someone who's stopped auditioning."
Later, in the car, Beck reached over and took Tessa's hand without looking away from the road.
"They really did love you," he said. "For what it's worth. I could tell."
"Your mom told me about the distance," Tessa said carefully. "The auditioning thing."
He was quiet for a long moment. "She's not wrong.
I've spent my whole life loving them completely and still never quite believing I was fully theirs to keep, if that makes sense.
Like belonging was conditional on good behavior, even though nobody ever once made me feel that way directly.
It's just a feeling I built myself, out of not knowing where I actually came from. "
"You're allowed to stop auditioning," she said, echoing his mother's words. "With them. With me. With any of it."
"Yeah," he said, quiet, something warm and a little raw in his voice. "I think I'm starting to figure that out."
? ? ?
The team started calling it "the retirement" sometime in February, a running joke that had clearly been building for weeks before Tessa ever heard it directly — Beck's old reputation, officially, publicly, hilariously over, and his teammates were not going to let him forget it quietly.
It came to a head at a team dinner, all of them crammed around a too-small table, when the freshman defenseman made the mistake of asking, with genuine innocence, whether Beck was still "doing his thing" on weekends.
The table erupted before Beck could even answer, Jax nearly falling off his chair laughing.
"His thing," Jax repeated, wiping his eyes. "Rook, you're new, so let me catch you up. There is no more thing. The thing retired in September. We had a small ceremony. Very moving."
"I did not retire anything," Beck said, though he was laughing too, unable to keep a straight face. "I just found something better than the thing."
"He brings her flowers," another teammate chimed in, delighted. "Actual flowers, Rook. Do you understand how insane that is for a guy who used to leave his own house parties through the bathroom window to avoid conversations the next morning?"
"That happened one time."
"It happened enough times that we started calling it the Callahan Exit. It had a name, Beck. We had a whole system for tracking it."
Tessa sat there laughing along with the rest of them, watching Beck take the ribbing with genuine good humor instead of defensiveness, and thought about how strange and wonderful it was to watch a boy's entire reputation dismantle itself in real time, publicly, with his own friends as witnesses, and have him not fight it, not even a little.
"You're not even mad they're doing this," she said quietly, once the table had moved on to a different topic.
"Why would I be mad? They're right." He shrugged, easy.
"I was a completely different person eight months ago.
I'm not ashamed of it exactly — I wasn't cruel to anyone, I was just closed off, avoiding anything that might actually cost me something if it went wrong.
But I'm not going to pretend I don't understand why they're making fun of it.
It's a genuinely dramatic before-and-after. I'd make fun of me too."
"What actually changed? I mean it, I want the real answer, not the charming deflection version."
He was quiet for a moment, considering the question seriously.
"You did. Not in some magic, instant way.
It was slower than that. But somewhere between the backpack and now, I started wanting things I'd spent years telling myself I didn't want — not just you specifically, though obviously you, but the whole picture.
Staying. Being known. Letting someone see the parts of me that weren't performing for an audience.
" He reached for her hand under the table.
"The old version of me thought that stuff was dangerous.
Turns out it was just waiting for the right person to be worth the risk.
" She leaned into his shoulder, warm all the way through, and thought that this — a boy who let his friends roast his old reputation without flinching — was worth every single one of the walls it had taken months to bring down.
She had no idea the scouts in the corner booth were about to make that reputation matter in a whole new way.