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“My mother.” I keep my voice easy. Not quite easy enough — he knows the register, he’s been reading me for weeks. “She wants me to go home next weekend.”

He doesn’t push. He just lies there in the dark with me and waits, and the waiting is so much more devastating than questions.

“My sister’s going to be there,” I say. “With news she wants to share in person.” I hear how that sounds. I hear the shape of the sentence doing what it does. “And I’m supposed to go be gracious about it.”

“Okay,” he says, in the voice that means he’s heard more than I said.

I look at the ceiling — the Burlington Marriott popcorn, same as every hotel ceiling ever. And I feel the whole weekend coming at me. The house, the family table, Maddison and whatever she’s about to announce, my mother’s careful warmth, my father’s conflict-averse silence. The particular exhaustion of being Margo in Charleston — performing the easy one for people who need me to be easy and have no idea I drove two-and-a-half hours north to watch a boy play hockey tonight.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Theo says. “About the sister thing.”

“I know.”

“But I’m —” A pause, like he’s picking the words the way he picks everything, carefully, not one wasted. “I’m here. If you want to.”

And there it is again. The drawer, open, on purpose. The man who doesn’t say the soft true things, saying the soft true thing.

“Not tonight,” I say. “Tonight I just want —” I gesture at the dark, at the two of us, at the whole improbable night. “This. Five more minutes of this, and then I’ll go back to being a person with a complicated family situation.”

“Five minutes,” he agrees. And his arm pulls me closer.

I’ll deal with Charleston in the morning. I’ll deal with Maddison’s news and my mother’s warmth and the whole complicated architecture of being a daughter in that house. I’ll figure out how to survive a weekend that has my name all over it in the kind of invisible ink that only shows up in the heat of being home.

But right now it’s two-forty in the morning in Burlington, Vermont, and Theo’s heartbeat is under my ear, and the rest of it can wait.

I’m getting very good at letting things wait that I used to never let wait. I don’t know what that means yet.

I think I’m starting to be afraid of what it means.

Chapter 10

Theo

She’s still asleep when I leave.

That’s the part I’ll turn over on the bus. Not the game, not the scout, not the fact that I’ve got a half-dozen teammates sleeping two floors down who cannot know I’m walking out of a room I wasn’t supposed to be in. Just the way she looks in the King-size bed at five-thirty in the morning, curled into the space I was occupying, one hand open on the pillow where my shoulder was.

I stand in the doorway and I look at her for longer than I should. I’m already dressed — jeans, the hoodie, boots unlaced because they’re quieter that way — and there’s no reason to still be in this doorway except that leaving means the night’s over, and the night was the best thing I’ve had in a long time, and I’m apparently not as good at walking out of rooms as I used to be.

The bus leaves at seven. I’ve got ninety minutes.

Go, I tell myself. The word lands the way it always does, clean and final, the way I say everything to myself. I tie my boots in the hall so the sound doesn’t wake her. I ease the door shut until the latch catches, soft as I can make it, and I stand in the empty fourth-floor corridor of the Burlington Marriott at five-thirty in the morning and I feel the weight of all the things I’m not looking at directly.

My room’s one floor down. Wyatt’s still out when I get there — he sleeps like he plays, with total commitment and no ambivalence — so I shower fast, pack my bag, and sit on the edge of the bed with my headphones in and nothing playing while the hotel wakes up around me floor by floor.

I don’t sleep. I’m done trying.

The bus is in the lot at six-fifty, engine running, half the team already on it looking like men who stayed up too late in Burlington celebrating a win they earned. I get on, find the back, put my bag overhead, and pull my hood up. The headphones go in. Nothing plays. I do that a lot — use them as a perimeter instead of for music, so nobody talks to me and I can be somewhere else for a while.

Right now I don’t want to think. Which means I’m thinking about everything.

The scout’s still a coin. No word from Coach, no signal, nothing. Just the image I can’t shake: upper bowl, blue jacket, empty seat by the time I checked. Which means he left before I could see his face, before I could read anything, and now I’m heading south with the most important sixty minutes of my life sitting behind me unscored. I play the shift back the way I play tape — every read, every gap, every decision — looking for the thing I should’ve done different, and I can’t find it, which is either good or the specific kind of bad where you don’t know what you did wrong until someone tells you.

I leave it. I’m done being able to do anything about it, and I’m bad at that, and the only thing that helps is doing something else with my hands.

I open the group chat.

Theo