36. Scottie-girl
Scottie-girl
The phone buzzes against the polished concrete floor, a low, persistent vibration that cuts through the silence.
It’s five in the morning. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Denver sky is a dull, flat gray—nothing like the bright, ambitious sunrise people associate with the mountains.
I swing my feet onto the floor, and the cold stone shocks me awake. The warmth of Cash’s skin disappears instantly, replaced by a sharp, biting chill creeping up my legs.
I search for the phone, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs before I even put the phone against my ear.
“Scottie Reed?”
The voice on the other end is thin, clipped, and surrounded by the hollow, synthetic echo of a hospital. I can hear a heart monitor looping somewhere in the background—that dry, metric beep-beep-beep that defines rooms where people don’t look at the sky.
“Yes.” I’m already reaching for the green sweatshirt Cash left on the back of the sofa, my fingers shaking as I shove my arms into the sleeves. “Yes, this is her. Who is this?”
“This is St. Elizabeth’s,” the woman says. “We have you listed as the secondary contact on the health proxy for Matthew O’Connell. We’ve tried the primary line four times, but it’s going straight to a network recording.”
“Cash,” I whisper, the name slipping out before I can stop it. I look over my shoulder at the bed.
He’s still dead to the world, a massive, dark shape buried under the white duvet, his face pressed into the pillow, one forearm dangling off the edge of the mattress.
His phone is on the kitchen island, abandoned and likely dead or silenced, the way he keeps it when he’s trying to shut out the demands of the agency.
“What’s happened?” I ask. “Is it an accident?”
“Mr. O’Connell was brought into the emergency department forty minutes ago by Boston transit police,” she says.
“He was located near the reservoir tracks. He wasn’t wearing shoes or a jacket, Miss Reed.
His core temperature was ninety-three when the ambulance arrived, and he’s currently showing signs of pneumonia from aspiration. ”
The air leaves my lungs in one short, cold burst. I look at the marble counter where we’d been laughing, drinking cheap wine and pretending the world was just the two of us in a vacuum.
“The reservoir?” I repeat, my brain struggling to process the geography. “He… Matthew lives in Winchester. He shouldn’t be—”
“No, ma’am,” the nurse interrupts, her voice softening just a fraction—the way people talk when they realize they’re the ones dropping the ceiling on you.
“Matthew O’Connell has been a resident at the Memory Care facility since last November.
He wandered past the secure perimeter during the shift change at midnight. We need his son, Miss Reed. Now.”
The line stays open, but the sound of the hospital fades into a dull, static roar in my ears.
Memory care.
The phrase hangs in the middle of the luxury loft like a smoke bomb. I turn around, my knees feeling loose, and look at the man on the bed.
Weeks. Three thousand miles of highway, of cheap oil filters and bad gas station coffee, of arguing over contract metrics and short-side recovery depths.
I knew every scar on his knuckles. I knew the exact tone of his voice when he was hiding a shoulder twitch from a trainer. I knew how he liked his eggs, and I knew the specific, obscure plumbing supply town he used for his ‘Gary Potts’ persona.
But I didn’t know this.
He’d kept the most massive, rotting pillar of his entire life buried so deep under his hockey gear that even his own agent hadn’t seen the shadow of it.
I walk over to the side of the bed, my hand reaching down to touch his bare shoulder. The skin is hot, solid, and smells faintly of the soap from last night—a jarring contrast to the sterile, cold reality of the phone call.
“Cash.”
He doesn’t move. I shake him, harder this time, my fingers digging into the thick muscle above his shoulder blade until he lets out a low, guttural grunt and shifts his head.
“Finn, wake up. It’s your dad.”
His eyes snap open instantly. He sees my face, sees the phone in my hand, and the lazy, sleepy curve of his mouth vanishes before he even sits up. “What?”
“St. Elizabeth’s,” I say, holding the phone out to him as if it’s a bomb. “It’s your dad. They found him by the tracks.”
Cash doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t even look at me. He just snatches the phone from my fingers, his long legs swinging out from under the duvet in one violent, uncoordinated movement that sends the white sheets trailing across the concrete floor.
He’s totally naked, but there isn’t a single shred of vulnerability in his posture—only a terrifying, singular focus.
“This is Finnian,” he says into the receiver, his thumb pressing hard against his ear as he stands up. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here. Give me the doctor.”
I don’t listen to the rest of the call. I can’t. The gravity of the situation is too heavy, and if I stand still, I’ll collapse.
I walk over to the kitchen island, my hands moving with that rapid, frantic efficiency that usually keeps me from feeling things. I start packing the duffel bags.
Our whole world—the small, stupid, perfect world we’ve been building since Washington—is collapsing into the bottoms of two nylon bags in less than three minutes.
I don’t fold anything. I just cram it in. Pack, go, fix, manage. It’s the only way I know how to exist.
***
The drive to Denver International Airport is a blur of red brake lights and highway lanes that we shouldn’t be in, but are anyway, rushing toward a flight to Boston. Cash drives with both hands locked onto the steering wheel.
He hasn’t spoken since we left the gate in the hills.
He hasn’t looked at me once.
“The flight is at seven-forty,” I say, staring straight ahead at the dash. “We’re going to make it, Finn. We’ll be at the hospital by four o’clock Boston time.”
He nods once, a short, tight jerk of his chin that tells me he heard me but doesn’t have the emotional grease to spare for a reply.
I look at his profile—the sharp line of his jaw, the small lump on his nose where it’s been broken twice by clearing-the-crease crosschecks. My throat feels dry, a small, bitter ache rising up behind my tongue that has nothing to do with the early morning air.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
The question just drops between us, small and heavy, landing right on the dashboard.
“Tell you what, Scottie?”
“About the Riverview place,” I say. “About the memory. You told me you were traveling. I spent three weeks adjusting your training mileage because I thought you were working out with the trainers in London. You were moving him into a home.”
A dark, sharp flash of hurt moves through my stomach as I say it.
It’s a quiet, selfish kind of hurt, but it’s there anyway—the realization that while I was falling in love with him in every diner and gravel turnout between Boston and Denver, he was keeping the largest part of his reality completely locked away in a separate ledger.
He’d let me be Bernadette; he’d let me play dress-up; but he hadn’t trusted me with the old man who wasn’t a bit at all.
“It wasn’t your business,” he says, his voice flat.
“I’m your agent, Cash,” I say, my voice rising just a fraction before I catch it. “Your family logistics affect your availability for the winter meetings. If they ask why you aren’t at the—”
“I don’t give a fuck about that, Scottie,” he interrupts. “And you weren’t my agent last night on the counter. Don’t do that. Don’t hide behind the binder because you’re mad I didn’t give you the paperwork on my old man’s brain.”
I look out the window, the flat, ugly concrete of the car rental returns spinning past us in a gray blur.
He’s right, of course.
I am hiding behind the binder.
I’m hiding because it hurts to know that he’d spent this whole time carrying that kind of weight by himself while I was busy worrying about his short-side recovery depth and his brand identity.
“I’m not mad about the paperwork,” I say quietly. “I just… I would have helped you, Finny. With the facility. With the legal stuff. That’s what I do.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you,” he says. “You’re an agent. You fix things. You find the clause in the contract that makes the problem go away. There isn’t a clause for this, Scottie. He doesn’t know my name half the time. I didn’t want you… I didn’t want you managing him.”
I don’t say anything to that.
The logic is too real, too human, and too much like him.
I reach across the space between the seats, my hand sliding over the rough wool of his sleeve until my fingers find his. He doesn’t let go of the wheel, but his fingers open up, wrapping around mine with a tight, desperate squeeze that tells me everything he’s too afraid to say out loud.
***
Cash pulls the van into a space near the fence at the long-term parking lot at DIA. He turns the key.
The engine doesn’t want to die. It gives one long cough before the rear-mounted engine finally goes still.
We step out, pull our bags from the back, and stand out on the gravel, the bags dropped near our sneakers, looking at the van.
It looks terrible.
The front air intakes are covered in a thick, yellow crust of grasshoppers from Nebraska; the sliding side door has a long, white streak from a low branch in the Idaho panhandle; and the rear window still has the faint, greasy outline of the GOALIE-MOBILE letters Cash had scraped off with a razor blade in Nashville.
It’s an ugly, iconic, utilitarian piece of history.
But as Cash reaches out to lock the hatch, his hand stays flat against the white-and-orange paint for five long seconds. His head is down, his shoulders slouched under his jacket, his thumb tracing the edge of a rust spot near the wheel well.
“We should have washed it,” he says, his voice thick.
“The salt keeps the character on,” I say, my throat tightening.
Leaving the van here, it somehow feels like losing a person.
“Come on,” I say. “The shuttle is coming.”
Cash doesn’t look back at the van when we climb into the airport bus. He sits with his forehead pressed against the scratched plexiglass window, his large hands flat on his knees, his eyes fixed on the terminal buildings rising up out of the asphalt ahead.
We move through the security line like ghosts, our sneakers clattering into the gray plastic bins, our identities verified by machines that don’t care that our lives were entirely different six hours ago.
Cash hasn’t touched his coffee. The paper cup is sitting between his feet, the plastic lid gathering a thin ring of brown scum as the steam dies out.
“I’ll call the Denver coach,” I say. “I’ll explain what happened. I’ll tell him you won’t be at practice, that we’re canceling it.”
“Don’t worry about it, Scottie,” he says. “If he’s pissed, he’s pissed.”
“He’s not going to be pissed, Finn.” I exhale. “I’ll call him myself. I’ll make sure he understands. I’m your agent. This is my job.”
He turns his head to look at me then.
His eyes are bloodshot, the dark circles under them looking like bruises in the harsh, sterile light of the terminal. He looks at me for a long, quiet second, his mouth opening just a fraction, as if the words are trying to force their way out through the grief.
But he doesn’t say anything.
The ticket agent clicks the microphone at the desk, the static burst making the passengers around us stand up and grab their coats.
Cash stands up, his massive frame instantly drawing the eyes of two teenagers near the water fountain.
Maybe the most heartbreaking thing is that he doesn’t even look like himself anymore.
He doesn’t look like the version of him that played pranks, or told stories, or dragged me into antique stores to play make-believe.
There is no crooked smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. No joke waiting behind his teeth. No ridiculous story about a man named Gary.
None of the weird, stubborn light he carried around.
It is all gone.
What stands in front of me now is just Finnian—stripped raw by fear, exhaustion, and a grief so old it has worn grooves into him.