Chapter One #2
I put on the version of me that gets things done.
I call the florist and add two wreaths to the entryway order because the lobby looks bare in my head.
I text the caterer to confirm the late-night cocoa bar for after the speeches because I want the donors to feel like kids with oversized mugs and unguarded smiles when they take out their credit cards.
I email the team PR lead to beg for one more player basket for the auction because the wives always go feral over those, and feral is good when you’re trying to raise money without turning the night into a guilt sermon.
When I’m done building the part of the evening other people will see, I open the spreadsheet that lives under the spreadsheets.
The tab I named PLAN B in a moment of honesty with myself.
It’s just the timeline. The way the night will unfold if I let it.
The dress. The makeup I don’t wear on non-gala days.
The simple necklace that sits right where his eyes went the last time he got close enough to fog my breathing.
The backup flats in my bag because heels are a prison when you want to move fast. The hotel keycard I don’t have yet and don’t know if I’ll ever get the nerve to accept.
I close the tab as if someone else could ever see inside me and take the evidence to court.
I’m halfway to convincing myself the office feels safe when the air changes.
The office door is closed. There’s no reason for the air to shift like this.
No reason for the tiny hairs along the back of my neck to lift as if someone just brushed them with knuckles.
I look at the door anyway. It stays shut.
I look at the vent. The heat’s on; it rattles and hums in that irregular way that makes you think of lungs, not machines.
It’s stupid to think your body can recognize someone by absence. It’s dumber to be right about it.
There is nothing to see. That’s important. Nothing. I am alone in here with the whiteboard and Andrew’s photo and a stack of donor packets that need ribbon. But my pulse has a specific rhythm when he’s near, and it drums it now.
I stand and go to the mini fridge in the corner to give my brain something to do that isn’t obsession.
There’s a Tupperware inside with a label in my handwriting—COOKIES—because parents insist on thanking the people who keep their kids skating by sending sugar.
I pop the lid, take one, and bite down. It tastes like stale peppermint and apology.
On my way back to the desk, I notice the corner of my tote is bent under something I don’t remember leaving on the floor. It’s nothing. It’s a shadow. It’s—
I kneel.
It’s a ribbon.
Not red. Not Christmas. Velvet. Dark blue so deep it eats the light the way ice accepts a blade.
It isn’t tied to anything. It lies there in an unbothered loop like it grew from the carpet.
When I pick it up, my fingers go tight before my brain can stop them.
I rub the fabric between my thumb and forefinger and the pressure is obscene in a way no one in the world would understand if they walked in right now and found me kneeling in front of my own bag, shaking.
I look at the ceiling like it might have answers. It doesn’t. It has water stains from the time the pipe burst last winter and my father didn’t go home for forty-eight hours because the rink was wounded and so was he.
The ribbon is nothing. It’s a scrap from the craft closet we keep for when we need to tape a fan’s sign back together. It’s a piece that fell from a wreath. It’s a Reindeer Fairy dropping fabric breadcrumbs because she couldn’t carry them all. The ribbon is nothing, and we don’t believe in ghosts.
We don’t. Except. Halloween taught me what kind of haunting I’m susceptible to, and sometimes ghosts are just living men with very steady hands and the ability to make a gift feel like a dare.
I put the ribbon in the desk drawer and close it with a care that feels like fear.
Then I open it again and take the ribbon back out and loop it around my wrist. It doesn’t stay.
Velvet isn’t a bow that holds if you want it to be quiet.
It slides. It settles against my palm like it was meant to be held, not worn.
Fine. I’ll hold it a minute. Just a minute.
Back at the glass, practice has broken into smaller scrimmages. The rookies slash at each other with something to prove. The veterans channel their proof into competence so casual it looks like kindness. My father’s whistle has gone from surgical to weary, which means he’ll call it soon.
Twenty-three is in the corner, pinning a defenseman in a way that looks illegal and is probably just artful.
He doesn’t look up, but the ribbon in my hand suddenly feels warmer, like someone breathed on it.
I tuck it into my coat pocket and the gesture is ridiculous and profound.
If he put it there—if—then he crossed a line and built a new one for me to step over.
If he didn’t, then I’ve let the hockey rink invade my brain all the way through, and the only cure is distance I don’t want.
“Samantha?”
I jump. The team manager stands in the doorway holding a clipboard and mercy. “Donation list,” she says, shaking the papers like they’re a flag we both agreed to follow. “Want to go through it with me?”
“Yes,” I say. My voice tries to be professional and lands on human. “Let’s do it.”
We sit at the desk and build a night that deserves to exist. We accept a spa package and reject a taxidermied fish.
We debate whether a weekend in a mountain cabin is romance or murder fodder and decide the donors can choose their own adventure.
We argue gently about tablecloth colors because she thinks white is clean and I think white is a lie on a night where red dresses and malbec will be everywhere.
We laugh. It feels foreign and wonderful, like trying on a light coat after months of armor.
In one of our pauses, when the office has forgiveness in it, the ice machine clunks to life behind the wall. I hear the last drill change, the pace of skates shifting from intent to exhaustion. Then the whistle. The one that means enough.
I don’t go to the glass this time. I don’t look. I make a pile of papers and a pile of pens and a pile of nerves, and I keep my hands away from my pocket even though the ribbon presses back like it wants out.
“Okay,” the manager says, circling totals. “We’re close.”
“We’re good,” I correct, and I let the pride be a balm. “We’re going to break every December number this team has ever posted.”
“You’re dangerous when you mean it.”
I smile without thinking. “I know.”
The boys file past the office on their way to the locker room, boots clapping over rubber mats, laughter pinging off cinderblock walls.
Someone sings a wrong-lyrics version of a Christmas song.
Someone else tells him to shut up with a grin.
My father barks “Hydrate” and gets a chorus of groans like he demanded their firstborn.
I don’t look for him. I don’t. I stare at the manager’s pen and the way it leaves a blue trail like the ribbon waiting in my pocket, and I breathe as quietly as I can in my own office, and I think about velvet and rules and a dress I haven’t put on yet.
When the hallway goes quiet, I get up and busy my hands with the pre-printed thank-you notes.
I sign my name in the place where gratitude is supposed to look easy.
I write little personal nothings in the margins—We can’t do this without you—to the people who like to be seen.
I tell myself writing is practice for telling the truth later, and then I tell myself I’m not going to tell any truths later, and then I admit I might have never been a good liar.
By the time I leave the office, night has pinned itself to the windows.
The rink lights change character after dusk.
They’re still bright, but it’s a brightness that feels like interrogation instead of performance.
I tuck my chin into my scarf as I walk the hallway.
The air outside the glass is colder; the Zamboni is making slow, precise passes and the driver raises a mitten at me as if we share a secret I haven’t learned yet.
My car lives in the far corner of the lot where the light pole leans like it got tired and no one wanted to correct it.
I like it back there. It feels like a place to decide who I’m going to be between the building and the rest of the world.
My boots crunch over old, stubborn snow.
The wind gets a finger under my scarf and slides down to my collarbone.
I pretend I hate it and court it anyway.
Halfway there, I stop.
It isn’t because I hear anything. The lot is as loud as a parking lot gets—distant traffic, an engine turning over, the tinny beat of someone’s music that refuses to be captured by winter.
I stop because I feel the specific pull of being looked at the way you feel a magnet near a needle. It doesn’t tug hard. It hums.
I do not turn. I do not whip around like a girl in a movie who wants to be caught silhouetted in her own suspense. I don’t even lift my head enough to see a reflection in a windshield. I let the looking rest on me the way a hand can rest on a thigh under a table—claim disguised as patience.
The keys bite into my palm. I could get in the car and lock the doors and tell myself the hum was a trick.
I could spin and catch him and demand answers.
He's been feeding me slowly, deliberately, like a man who knows starving makes the eventual meal taste more like salvation.
I do neither. I breathe in until my chest aches, and I keep walking, and it takes everything I own not to run toward him or from him.
Inside the car, the heater coughs itself awake.
The windshield fogs, then clears, then smears things into a watercolor that would be pretty if my hands didn’t shake.
I rest my forehead on the steering wheel for a beat longer than confidence would allow.
I count to five. On two, I smile. I don’t know why.
At four, my eyes burn, but it isn’t sadness.
It's a relief. It’s the relief of a promise kept: you are not done with this just because the calendar flipped.
At five, I sit up and turn my head.
There is nothing there. Of course there isn’t. The lot is a patchwork of cars and shadows. The wind moves the world in small measurable ways. I am a woman in a car on a winter night, and what I want is not on the concrete.
It’s in my pocket.
I take the ribbon out and lay it across the steering wheel, my fingers on either end, the velvet line cutting my car in half. I lift it and press it under my nose because I’m not proud and because sometimes I need rituals. It smells like fabric and cold. It smells like a decision.
At home, I put the ribbon on my dresser like a relic.
I don’t bury it in a drawer. I don’t hide it under a sweater.
It sits out, obvious, dangerous. A blue-black line cutting the safe parts of my room away from the parts that hold my truths.
The dress I bought for the gala waits in its bag, quiet and explosive.
I touch the hanger and a spark pops under my skin like static.
I shower too hot. I stand there until the water runs out of stories to tell me about comfort and the mirror fogs so heavy it forgets I exist. I love that part—the moment before I wipe the glass where I could be anyone.
Where the girl in the corn maze and the woman in the office and the daughter on the top row of Section 103 all dissolve into a shape that has not yet been chosen.
When I wipe the mirror, my mouth is still my mother’s and my eyes are still my brother’s and my stubborn, hungry heart is my own.
In bed, I do not sleep. I think about auction lots and table assignments and whether anyone will notice if I pull the second dessert because the first one is better.
I think about my father and the way he looked at me like breathing near wolves is an invitation.
I think about the maze and what it felt like to stop running on purpose.
I think about Christmas. Not the kind people wrap. The kind you earn by telling yourself the truth in the dark and then opening your eyes and saying it out loud.
When sleep finally drags me down, the last thing I see is the ribbon lying on my dresser like an answer, and the last thing I feel is the weight of a gaze I did not witness and did not imagine and did not deny.
December has a sound. It also has a promise.
Nine days. Then the gala. Then the dress. Then whatever I am under velvet when the world looks away.