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Everything in me goes cold.

I stay exactly where I am for a second, with my hand on his side, because I don’t know what happens if I move. Then I come up and sit back on my heels beside him, and he sits up against the wall and doesn’t look at me. He looks at the window, the blinds, the desk.

His dad?

My brain keeps catching on that, over and over. I met him. Wade Kennebeck drove five hours on a Saturday to watch his kid play an exhibition, and afterward, he hugged Nash in the rink lobby with both arms, one of those back-thumping, rocking-side-to-side dad hugs. I stood there with my popcorn and thought it was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen. I liked him. Jesus Christ, I liked him. He told me about six-year-old Nash sleeping in his shoulder pads with his mouthguard in, and his whole face lit up while he said it, and I laughed, and he looked so pleased.

And in the middle of that hug, he put his hand on Nash’s side. Left side. Low.

I was right there. I watched Nash go still under it, so still I figured he’d taken a hit to the ribs in the game, and I decided that’s all it was, and I didn’t push. I stood three feet away and smiled while that man rested his palm on the exact place he—

His palm.

I shook his hand. Twice. The middle of it was smooth and shiny and tight, like shrink-wrap, with a ridge at the base of his thumb, and the same shine on the back of his wrist going up into his sleeve. A work thing, probably.

My mouth floods with spit, the thin, sour kind you get right before you throw up, and I swallow it down hard.

“Your dad,” I say. It comes out wrong. It isn’t even a question.

“Yeah.” He drags the back of his hand across his mouth, and it takes him a long time to say the next thing. “I was fifteen.”

Fifteen. He’s eighteen. It’s the simplest math I’ve ever done, and I do it anyway, twice, because it’s so stupidly small. Three years ago, I was crying in the car about a C-plus in chemistry. Three years ago, my biggest problem was that my mom wouldn’t let me hang out with my boyfriend on a school night. And three years ago, this exact body, this exact stubborn, enormous, impossible boy, was fifteen, and he was—

“It was November. I’d just gotten cut from a showcase team, the one the scouts go to.” He stops and starts again. “We’d been fighting about it for three days. He said I got cut because I played soft and never listened. And that Saturday, he was out back burning a brush pile. Leaves, old fence boards. He does it every fall. It wouldn’t catch right, and he’s yelling at me the whole time, and he tells me to go get the gas can out of the garage and hold it.”

His thumb is moving on the edge of the mattress.

“So I’m standing there holding a gas can while he tells me I’m soft. And I said I was done. I tried to walk away. And he took the can out of my hands and poured it on a pile that was still going.”

He does it with his own hands in the air in front of him, a short, hard tip, and I watch him do it.

“It goes up all at once,” he says. “It came up the side of the pile and got me. The whole left side.”

I start to picture the pile, the smoke, a fifteen-year-old Nash’s hoodie going up in flames. I make myself stop right there, halfway through, because I physically cannot finish that picture while my palm is lying on top of the result.

“He tackled me,” Nash says. “Rolled me. It wasn’t going out, so he beat it out with his hands. I remember him screaming my name the whole time.”

His dad’s hands. The ones I shook.

“He swore he didn’t do it on purpose,” Nash says. “But he––it wasn’t the first time he hurt me.”

And then a flash goes through me so hot and ugly that the edges of the room blank out. I want to get in my car. I want to drive five hours to whatever town that backyard is in and stand in front of that warm, funny, handshaking man and—I don’t even know. I’m five-four. I’ve never hit anyone in my life. I don’t know what I would do. Something. Something that would make him understand, make it go into him the way it went into—

The pressure behind my eyes is unbearable, and my nose starts to burn. Don’t you dare. Because if I cry, he’ll have to deal with me crying. I know exactly how it would go. He’d get that crease between his eyebrows and reach for me and say something gruff and useless like hey, come here, it’s fine, and he’d spend the rest of tonight taking care of me, and I’d rather die before I let him do that right now. So I breathe in through my nose, the way he does, and hold it until the burning backs off.

“What happened after?” I hear myself ask. I can’t help it.

“My mom drove us to the ER. Him with his hands wrapped in wet towels in the front seat.” His jaw moves. “Then the burn unit. Two weeks. Two surgeries for the grafts.”

His mom was there. Now I’m horrified. I swallow. “What did you tell them?”

One shoulder lifts. “That it was an accident.”

“Nash.”

“It was an accident,” he says. “He put it out with his hands.” He stops. “He was standing right there when I said it to the nurse. And every time since, he talks about it like I didn’t listen. Like he told me to step back and I didn’t.”

I feel like I just swallowed something with edges.