32. Lucy
LUCY
NOW
By the time I admitted the coffee had become a routine, Dottie was already sitting by the office door like faith had a schedule.
At first, I told myself the coffee was an event.
A strange event. A suspicious event. A Ty Burns event, which meant it came with broad shoulders, emotional inconvenience, and a statistically unreasonable chance of ruining my morning.
Then it happened again.
And again.
And then late winter started loosening its grip on Northbend by stubborn inches, and somewhere between the last hard freeze and the first morning the snowbanks near the staff lot turned gray at the edges, Ty Burns became part of the structure of my day.
I hated that sentence. I hated that I had just thought it in a full, grammatically correct way.
Dottie did not hate it. Dottie had embraced the concept with the sort of devotion usually reserved for saints, fools, and dogs with access to whipped cream.
By the time the Frosthawks’ playoff chances began turning into the kind of math that made coaches look at whiteboards like they had personally betrayed them, Dottie knew the sound of footsteps in the hallway better than most of the front office staff.
She knew the hour. She knew the pause outside my door.
She knew the faint paper-and-coffee smell of a Paper Lantern bag before it appeared.
On mornings Ty was physically in the building, she waited by the office door. She sat, front paws placed with ridiculous care on the rug, ears at attention, body still except for the slow, hopeful sweep of her tail.
“She is not waiting for him,” I told Bea one morning while Dottie stared at the hallway with the focus of a woman awaiting a royal procession.
Bea glanced up from the wedding seating chart she had spread across my desk. Her hair was twisted into a loose knot, a pencil tucked behind one ear, her expression caught somewhere between public relations crisis and bridal exhaustion.
“She’s waiting for whipped cream,” Bea guessed.
“Exactly.”
“That does not make this less embarrassing for you.”
“I am not embarrassed.”
Bea looked at me. I looked back. Dottie’s tail thumped once. Bea returned to her seating chart. “Sure.”
My office did not look like a conference room with an identity crisis anymore.
That had happened gradually. A lamp first, brass with a warm shade that softened the corners of the room after three in the afternoon.
Then bookshelves, because once I admitted I needed shelves, I apparently admitted I needed three.
A better chair that did not make my lower back file complaints by noon.
A washable dog bed that looked less like emergency shelter inventory and more like something chosen by a woman who intended to stay.
The walls were no longer bare. The first thing I hung was not a diploma or a framed team photograph or anything that made sense for the Director of Player Operations.
It was a picture from brunch with Lo, Bea, and Freya, all of us squeezed into one side of the frame while Arlo leaned into the background with two fingers up behind my head like a twelve-year-old.
Lo looked beautiful, laughing. Bea had one hand lifted, caught mid-protest. Freya’s smile took up half the room. I was smiling too, real enough that when I first saw the printed photo, something in my chest had gone painfully quiet. Arlo had written favorite Thomas on the back in black marker.
That morning, Bea tapped the end of her pencil against the seating chart. “Do you think your father would object to being near Rafa if they both have access to appetizers?”
“My father can behave for an entire dinner.”
Bea stared at me.
“For most of an entire dinner,” I corrected.
“Helpful.”
“Rafa can also behave.”
“Your tone suggests otherwise.”
“My tone suggests I have met men.”
Bea made a thoughtful sound and moved a sticky note. “Alois says we should put all emotionally complicated men at one table and let them sort themselves out.”
“That sounds like a security issue.”
“That is what I said.”
Dottie’s tail started moving harder.
The knock was light. Two taps against the open doorframe.
Ty stood at the threshold in team sweats, hair still damp from the shower, one Paper Lantern cup in his right hand and Dottie’s smaller cup in the left. He did not step inside. “Morning,” he said.
My body, traitorous and specific, softened around the word. “Morning,” I responded quickly.
Bea looked between us with the expression of a woman who had decided survival required sudden interest in her seating chart.
Dottie stood, walked to the threshold, and sat directly in front of Ty’s shoes.
Ty looked down at her. “Good morning to you too.”
Her tail swept the floor.
Ty crouched outside the office and set Dottie’s pup cup on the floor. The sticker read DOTTIE GIRL in Naomi’s neat block letters. Dottie lowered her face into it with immediate, undignified joy.
Ty stood and held my coffee out.
I got up to take it. The old version of me would have stayed behind the desk and made him cross the room. The old version of him would have done it before remembering he had promised not to.
I reached for the cup. Our fingers did not touch this time. His gaze dropped briefly to the desk behind me, then returned to my face.
“You’re drawing,” he remarked.
My heart lurched hard enough that I almost lost my grip on the coffee.
On the right side of my desk, half tucked beneath an event binder, lay the sketchbook I had opened before either of them arrived.
I had meant to make a list. That was all.
A practical list. A useful list. A list of vendor deadlines or roster availability or the latest playoff scenarios that made everyone in hockey operations talk like people discussing weather damage.
Instead, I had found myself drawing the lake.
Not Alder Lake.
Not the river trail.
The view from his living room windows, the one I had seen the night everything changed and nothing got fixed.
The dark sweep of frozen water. The distant tree line.
The low edge of the porch cutting across the foreground.
I had drawn it from memory, lightly at first, so lightly I could have pretended the lines were nothing.
I looked at the sketchbook as if it had betrayed classified information. “It’s nothing,” I said.
Ty’s gaze held on the page, but not greedily. Not like he was taking it from me. More like he had stumbled across a quiet animal in the woods and knew better than to move too fast. “I always liked your pencil sketches,” he said.
“You say that like you have refined artistic opinions,” I mocked.
His mouth curved. “I have one refined artistic opinion.”
“Which is?”
“That you make quiet things look like they’re keeping secrets.”
The room tilted slightly.
Bea coughed into her hand.
I stared at Ty.
He stared back for one beat, then lifted his free hand just a little. “I am not even sorry for that one.”
“You should be.”
“I know.”
The restraint bothered me more than the flirting. The flirting I knew what to do with. I could deflect it, flatten it, roll my eyes until it lost power. The restraint left me alone with the fact that I wanted him to stay.
Ty glanced toward Bea. “Sorry for interrupting wedding diplomacy.”
Bea lifted the pencil. “If you have strong feelings about whether Ezra Thomas and Rafa Ribeiro should be seated within stabbing distance of the same bread basket, now is the time.”
Ty considered this with visible seriousness. “Depends on the bread.”
I pressed my lips together.
Bea pointed at him. “That was unfortunately helpful.”
Ty’s smile came and went. Then he looked at me, softening again. “Have a good day, Luce.”
My throat tightened.
I could have said thank you. It sat there, waiting, simple and deserved. But thanking him felt too clean. Too tidy. As if I were accepting a gift instead of participating in a ritual that was doing something to both of us.
So I lifted the coffee. “Tell Coach the playoff math looks less depressing if he stops staring at it.”
Ty’s eyes warmed. “I’ll pass that along.”
Then he left.
No extra line.
No lingering look designed to make my pulse misbehave.
Just Ty stepping back into the hallway while Dottie licked whipped cream from a paper cup and my half-finished sketch of his lake sat exposed on my desk.
Bea waited until his footsteps faded. Then she coughed, “Well.”
I looked at the Paper Lantern logo on the cup. “Do not.”
She held up both hands. “I won’t.”
The routine did not get bigger after that. A fact that made it dangerous.
Ty did not start texting me good morning.
He did not ask if I liked the coffee. He did not turn every cup into a conversation.
He did not use Dottie as an excuse to hover in my office, which was annoying because Dottie would have absolutely supported him in that betrayal if whipped cream remained involved.
On my off days, nothing came. Not a cup at my apartment door. Not a cup sent to Naomi’s back table when I worked from Paper Lantern. Not a casual text that pretended not to be checking whether I was thinking about him.
He let my life remain mine.
Then, on mornings I was at the arena and he was not, coffee appeared anyway. Sometimes at my desk. Sometimes with Sarah, who handed it off without comment because Sarah could run an organization during a power outage and still respect a private emotional crisis.
Once, with Rusty, who stared at the cup like it might explode.
“Burns said this was yours,” he said.
“It is.”
“Dog thing too.”
Dottie, who had been asleep until the exact second Rusty entered, rose from her bed with priestly purpose.
Rusty looked down at her. “You people are weird.”
“Yes,” I giggled, taking the cups. “Thank you.”
He left muttering something about hockey players and whipped cream.
The Frosthawks kept losing games they needed and winning games too late to make anyone comfortable. The word playoffs remained in the building, but it had started moving differently. Less like a plan. More like a prayer people were embarrassed to say out loud.
The road schedule got uglier. So did the weather.