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“Can we — not yet. With the public part.” She holds my eyes. “I know what that sounds like. I know it sounds like I’m asking you to keep being a secret and we just —” She stops. Starts again. “I have reasons. Real ones. Not just scared ones.”

“Tell me.”

She pulls her knees up. Organizing her thoughts — I know what that looks like, too. “Your team is what, three wins from conference finals?”

“Two.”

“Two. And then the Frozen Four.” She says it like she knows what it means, because she does. She’s been watching my games. “That’s April. That’s everything you’ve been working toward this whole season, and if we walk into that stretch with the whole campus knowing about us, there will be noise. Not bad noise, just — noise. Questions. Attention on us instead of on the ice.” She meets my eyes. “I don’t want to be a distraction. Not during the most important month of your season.”

I look at her. She keeps going.

“And I have Nationals in April. Same window. My team has been working for this all year, and I need to be at practice and at every qualifier, and I need my head to be in it.” A breath. “And we still have our presentation. That’s Thursday. We’re going to walk into a seminar room and present a story we built about ourselves to Dr. Adler and fourteen other people, and I need to be able to do that without the whole room already knowing what they’re looking at.”

She stops. She looks at me like she’s waiting to see if the logic lands.

It lands.

“So, a few weeks,” she says. “After the presentation. After conference finals. After Nationals. And then we do it properly — not a secret, not an arrangement. Just us.”

I think about the timeline. The count of it. Conference finals. The Frozen Four. Her Nationals in April. Six, maybe eight weeks. She’s not asking me to keep hiding it — she’s asking me to keep it contained until the noise of it won’t cost either of us something real.

“Okay,” I tell her.

She blinks. “Just okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not going to —”

“Margo.” I look at her. “It’s eight weeks. I’ve been waiting since October. I can wait eight more weeks.”

She does the thing — the sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a cry.

“Not yet,” she says, like she needs to hear it one more time.

“Not yet,” I agree. “But not never.”

She nods. She leans back against the headboard, and I lean back beside her, and the quiet settles in again.

Beau already knows. Sloane already knows. That’s enough for now.

She stays until past midnight. Then she goes home, and I lie in the dark in the room where she just told me she loves me, and I think about the specific weight of being wanted by someone who only wants real things.

I don’t sleep for a while. It’s fine. I don’t need to.

I’m on my way out of the athletic complex when my phone goes. Unknown number, but I’ve been half-expecting something since the University of Vermont game in Burlington. I step out of the foot traffic and answer.

“Theo.” Smooth. Professional. The voice of a man who makes his living knowing exactly how to open a conversation. “Dan Reiss. Do you have a few minutes?”

I have a few minutes.

He wants to schedule a video conference. Not a call — a conference. Screens. He wants to look at me while we talk, which means this is further along than a first-touch conversation. He mentions interest from organizations he can’t name yet. He mentions the timeline. He mentions that at twenty, I don’t need a parent or guardian present — which I knew, but he says it anyway in the tone of someone used to managing families.

“I’d like my coach on the call,” I tell him.

A beat. “Of course. Coach O’Grady?”

“Yeah.”