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on the bus. everyone accounted for

No reply for a few minutes. Then, from Sloane:

stopped for gas in Montpelier. beau tried to pump it one-handed, I removed him from the situation

Beau

I have one good arm

Sloane

exactly. we’re back on the road

And then, from Margo, a photo: the view out the passenger window, Vermont highway going silver-gray with early morning light, the yellow center line running to nothing. No caption. Just the road, and the fact that she sent it to me knowing I’m on the bus looking at the same road from the other side. She was awake. She woke up and I was gone and she sent me the road.

I stare at it for longer than I should.

how’s the arm I text. Beau, technically. But not really.

Margo

he’s been icing it since we got in the car and telling us he’s fine

Beau

it’s not killing me

Sloane

It’s definitely killing him

I put the phone down. Pick it up again. And I do the thing I’ve been doing for three weeks without letting myself look at directly: I wish I was in that car. With Sloane navigating and Beau pretending his arm doesn’t hurt and Margo in the back passenger seat taking pictures of Vermont highways in the early light. It’s not complicated. It’s not an arrangement or a term or a thing with a box. It’s just: I want to be where she is. I’ve wanted to be where she is since roughly October, and I’ve been calling it something else, and I’m running out of names.

I put the phone face-down on my knee and watch Vermont go gray-green out the window and don’t examine any of it.

The phone lights up when we’re an hour out from Whitmore.

Dad.

I know what it is before I open it. It’s always the same — the angle, the lighting, the arm at the edge of the frame. This time it’s both of them: Noah and Logan in matching Bruins gear, which is a specific kind of irony I can’t fully appreciate from a team bus in the dark. They’re grinning. They look like good kids, which I know they are, which doesn’t make it easier. Logan’s got a gap where a tooth used to be. Noah’s got the same jawline I have, which is the thing I can never look at directly.

And underneath the photo, the text:

Planning to bring the boys to one of your home games. Let me know the schedule — would love for them to see you play.

I read it twice. Then I put the phone face-down on my knee, same position I put it in after texting Margo, except this time the inside of my chest is a different temperature entirely.

He’s never come to a game.

Not once. Not junior hockey, not the first two years here, not a single game in my entire career — and now he wants to bring the boys, the second family, to Whitmore, to my rink, like it’s a casual thing, like showing up is something he has a history of doing. Would love for them to see you play. Like he didn’t spend fifteen years not seeing me play. Like the money that comes in every month on the first makes us close. Like I won’t be sitting at my laptop looking at the total in a spreadsheet and thinking about all the ways he pays for my life except the one way that ever would’ve mattered.

The wall goes up. Clean and fast, the way it does when he gets too close.

I don’t reply. I make a note in the back of my head: check the home schedule, figure out which game I want to offer up if I have to. Something that isn’t a big one. Something where it matters less what he sees. And then I close that part of my head the way I close every part that has his name on it, and I watch Vermont turn to Massachusetts, and I don’t feel anything about it.

That’s the goal, anyway. Coach finds me in the hallway outside the locker room when the bus gets back, before I’ve even got my bag off my shoulder. That’s how I know it’s about the scout.

“Walk with me,” is all he says.