Page 175 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I find the hockey rink first.

Not because I'm looking for it, because I hear it. The crack of a stick, the scrape of blades, the particular echo of a puck hitting boards in an enclosed space. Old instincts die hard. I follow the sound around the side of the building and find a service entrance propped open with a brick.

I let myself in.

The rink is mostly empty with just a few players running drills at the far end, a coach running his mouth from the boards. I move through the shadows of the upper corridor and look down through the glass at the ice below, scanning out of habit more than expectation.

She's not here. She wouldn't be rink side at a university she just enrolled in, that's not how she moves. She's careful. She keeps her head down when she needs to and I know her well enough by now to understand she'd be rebuilding quietly, methodically, away from anything that might feel too familiar.

I move on.

I find her on the third day.

Not dramatically. Not the way these things happen in stories, no rain, no cinematic lighting, no moment designed to make anyone feel better about what comes next. I find her because I've spent three weeks learning to think like her, and because thinking like her is disturbingly easy for a man who spent months convinced he didn't care.

A coffee shop three blocks from campus. Tuesday morning, between nine and ten because she always studied between nine and ten when she had somewhere to be at eleven, a habit I noticed without meaning to and apparently filed away without realizing it.

I spot her through the window before I go in.

She's sitting alone at a corner table with a textbook open in front of her and a coffee going cold at her elbow because she always forgets to drink it when she's reading. Her hair is down. She's wearing an oversized sweater I don't recognize, bought here, part of the new life she's constructing without me and her hand is resting on the cover of the textbook but she's not reading it. She's looking out the window at nothing.

She looks tired.

She looks like someone who's been sleeping in batches and thinking too much in the hours between.

She looks like herself, stripped of every defense, when she doesn't know anyone is watching.

Something in my chest does something I'm not going to describe.

I push the door open and walk in.

The bell above the door pulls her gaze from the window automatically, reflexive, the alert instincts of someone who's learned to monitor their surroundings. She scans the room the way people do when they've been taught to always know the exits.

Her eyes find me.

The color drains from her face.

I watch it happen, watch the sequence of it, the shock first, then something that moves too fast across her features to catch cleanly, then the walls slamming up. She's good. Most people would miss it entirely. I'm not most people.

I cross the room and pull out the chair across from her and sit down.

She doesn't run. I didn't expect her to, she's not built for running, not really, even when she tries. She lifts her chin instead, squares her shoulders, and looks at me with an expression that costs her more than she's letting on.

“How.” It's not a question. Her voice is steady and I hate how much I missed the sound of it.

“You forget to drink your coffee when you're reading.” I say. “You always study between nine and ten. You pick corners because you don't like your back to a room.” I hold her gaze. “I know you.”

Something flickers. She extinguishes it immediately. “You need to leave.”

“No.”

Her jaw tightens. “Xaden⁠—”

“You named Cas head of the cartel,” I say it quietly, without preamble. “You balanced three towns against each other so none of them could move without toppling the whole structure. You built a peace on your way out the door.” I pause. “You thought of everything.”

“I tried to.” Her voice is carefully neutral.

“You didn't think of one thing.”