Page 128 of Unmanageable

I know the rules. I know exactly why we shouldn’t do this, why the agency would pull her off my account the second they found out. But looking at her now, none of those boundaries feel heavy enough to stop me.

Tomorrow, I think, closing my eyes as I pull the blanket over her shoulders, my fingers finding hers under the linen. Tomorrow morning, before the practice starts. I’ll say it then.

36

Scottie-girl

The phone buzzes against the polished concrete floor, a low, persistent vibration that cuts through the silence.

It’s five in the morning. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Denver sky is a dull, flat gray—nothing like the bright, ambitious sunrise people associate with the mountains.

I swing my feet onto the floor, and the cold stone shocks me awake. The warmth of Cash’s skin disappears instantly, replaced by a sharp, biting chill creeping up my legs.

I search for the phone, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs before I even put the phone against my ear.

“Scottie Reed?”

The voice on the other end is thin, clipped, and surrounded by the hollow, synthetic echo of a hospital. I can hear a heart monitor looping somewhere in the background—that dry, metric beep-beep-beep that defines rooms where people don’t look at the sky.

“Yes.” I’m already reaching for the green sweatshirt Cash left on the back of the sofa, my fingers shaking as I shove my arms into the sleeves. “Yes, this is her. Who is this?”

“This is St. Elizabeth’s,” the woman says. “We have you listed as the secondary contact on the health proxy for Matthew O’Connell. We’ve tried the primary line four times, but it’s going straight to a network recording.”

“Cash,” I whisper, the name slipping out before I can stop it. I look over my shoulder at the bed.

He’s still dead to the world, a massive, dark shape buried under the white duvet, his face pressed into the pillow, one forearm dangling off the edge of the mattress.

His phone is on the kitchen island, abandoned and likely dead or silenced, the way he keeps it when he’s trying to shut out the demands of the agency.

“What’s happened?” I ask. “Is it an accident?”

“Mr. O’Connell was brought into the emergency department forty minutes ago by Boston transit police,” she says. “He was located near the reservoir tracks. He wasn’t wearing shoes or a jacket, Miss Reed. His core temperature was ninety-three when the ambulance arrived, and he’s currently showing signs of pneumonia from aspiration.”

The air leaves my lungs in one short, cold burst. I look at the marble counter where we’d been laughing, drinking cheap wine and pretending the world was just the two of us in a vacuum.

“The reservoir?” I repeat, my brain struggling to process the geography. “He… Matthew lives in Winchester. He shouldn’t be—”

“No, ma’am,” the nurse interrupts, her voice softening just a fraction—the way people talk when they realize they’re the ones dropping the ceiling on you. “Matthew O’Connell has been a resident at the Memory Care facility since last November. He wandered past the secure perimeter during the shift change at midnight. We need his son, Miss Reed. Now.”

The line stays open, but the sound of the hospital fades into a dull, static roar in my ears.

Memory care.

The phrase hangs in the middle of the luxury loft like a smoke bomb. I turn around, my knees feeling loose, and look at the man on the bed.

Weeks. Three thousand miles of highway, of cheap oil filters and bad gas station coffee, of arguing over contract metrics and short-side recovery depths.

I knew every scar on his knuckles. I knew the exact tone of his voice when he was hiding a shoulder twitch from a trainer. I knew how he liked his eggs, and I knew the specific, obscure plumbing supply town he used for his ‘Gary Potts’ persona.

But I didn’t know this.

He’d kept the most massive, rotting pillar of his entire life buried so deep under his hockey gear that even his own agent hadn’t seen the shadow of it.

I walk over to the side of the bed, my hand reaching down to touch his bare shoulder. The skin is hot, solid, and smells faintly of the soap from last night—a jarring contrast to the sterile, cold reality of the phone call.

“Cash.”

He doesn’t move. I shake him, harder this time, my fingers digging into the thick muscle above his shoulder blade until he lets out a low, guttural grunt and shifts his head.