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“Your license for ID, it’s domestic —”

“I have it.”

“Checked bag or carry-on, because the baggage claim in Charleston is slow, and if we check, we’ll be standing around for —”

“Carry-on,” I say. “I travel light.”

“Good.” She puts the phone away. She does the thing she does when she’s done managing something and doesn’t know what to do with her hands — the small adjustment, the settled stillness she never quite lands. Then she looks at me.

The bright version isn’t running. Not fully. This is something else — careful and open at the same time, the combination I’ve only been getting from her lately, in the specific moments when she’s decided to tell me something real.

She tells me something real.

“You came to my practice,” she says. Light. Exact. The blade already in her eyes. “I figured I’d return the favor.”

The laugh comes out before I can stop it.

Not a smile. Not the corner-of-the-mouth thing. An actual laugh — brief, real, in a hockey rink where I have never once laughed at anything. Because that’s exactly it. That’s the whole of it. And the fact that she said it like that — the specific timing of it, the delivery, the way she was clearly waiting for the right moment to land it — that’s the precise reason I drove across town at midnight on a Wednesday. That’s the reason the coin feels less like the only thing.

She looks pleased. She’s earned it.

“You’re insufferable,” I tell her.

“You laughed,” she says. “I win.”

“You win nothing. We’re still going to your family thing.”

The brightness pulls slightly tight over something real. Just for a second. “We are,” she agrees.

I look at her. She looks back. The rink is clearing around us — teammates heading to the locker room, the Zamboni guy starting his round — and neither of us says the next thing, the thing that’s actually true, which is that this stopped being an arrangement a long time ago and we’re both just very practiced at not saying so.

“I’ll be there,” I say instead. Not the whole sentence. The part she needs.

She hears it. Something in her face goes soft in the specific way it only goes soft with me. She looks down, then back up. “Okay,” she says. It means more than okay.

Coach’s office. He’s still got the whiteboard up.

“You got a minute?” I ask.

“Sit.”

I sit. “I need to miss Friday practice.”

He looks up. Waiting.

“Family thing,” I say. “I need to be somewhere.” That’s — most of the truth. Charleston is about a family. Just not mine. “Next game isn’t until Tuesday. I’ll be back for film on Monday.”

Coach looks at me for a long moment. He’s known about my father the way coaches know things — from the shape of what’s missing, from the way a player plays when something’s wrong at home, from the years of watching me practice like a man trying to outrun something. He’s never once asked me about Lucas directly.

He doesn’t now.

“You’re playing some of the best hockey of your season,” he says.

“I know.”

“You’re also a person.” He picks up his coffee. “Go. Back by Monday. And Mercer —” I stop at the door. “Whatever it is. I hope it helps.”

I nod. I walk out of the rink with a ticket on my phone and a Thursday practice in my legs and tomorrow arriving whether I’m ready or not.