Page 3 of Grief & Glitter

“Did he enjoy your visit?”

I could lie, but she’d see right through me. “No.”

“And your brother?”

I laughed, and there wasn’t much in it. “He turned up to breakfast and made it twenty-three minutes.”

Noah had grumbled about work to Dad—easy enough, seeing as Dad was a cop and Noah was a cop and they had easy cop stuff to moan over. He’d talked to the waitress about the Lions and whether they had a chance this year. He never once asked how I’d been, and when he did finally look at me, it was to ask how long I was staying. I told him not long, and we exchanged a few other things, but it was enough to send me back home before the coffee went cold, to spend the rest of the summer back in Rochester.

Dr. Ellison uncrossed one leg and straightened her pant leg, leaning back a little, totally at ease as I slowly unraveled in front of her.

“Has anything changed?” she asked.

I considered the question, but it was a big no. Dad still cut me out, and Noah still hated me. My old room at Dad’s house still smelled of cedar and furniture polish. The grandfather clock in the hallway still ran twenty minutes slow. Ethan’s photo still sat on the unused piano beside Mom’s, and nobody had added a single new picture in ten years. The whole family had frozen in place.

“You’ve gone somewhere else.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking. I mean, I thought it’d be different. Ten years felt like it should have been enough.”

“But it wasn’t?”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t. My father doesn’t blame me but has no idea how to talk to me, and I blame myself and have no idea how to start talking either. Noah…” I shrugged. “He’s just Noah.”

“We’ve talked about blame before,” she started, and I winced. I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned blame because she always pushed things.

“I don’t want to go into that today,” I said, but even though she nodded, I could see that my thoughts of blame were exactly what we were going to be discussing.

“What did you and Noah talk about?”

“He asked if there was any talk of me heading up to the NHL, and I said no, and he said, ‘Figures,’ and that was it.” I heard the rest of it anyway, the part he didn’t need to say out loud. You’re the one who got to grow up. Not good enough for the big leagues despite everything. Still playing hockey. Still breathing.

My fingers curled around my forearm, and I caught Dr. Ellison glancing there.

“No new injuries, doc,” I reassured her, and she nodded. It would be three years on October 12th. I remembered dates. Hospital bathroom, three stitches, the trainer finding out because blood had soaked clean through the tape. I tilted my chin. “But I still think about it.”

Hockey filled the spaces in my head, and she’d once asked if I punished myself with hockey. There wasn’t much point saying no, what with morning skates I didn’t need to run. Extra reps after everyone else had gone home. First on the ice, last off it. Blocked shots that smarter players stepped around, playing through things that should have sent me straight to the medical room, because if I hurt enough by the end of the day, I could usually sleep. I wasn’t punishing myself with hockey—it was my safe place. I didn’t deserve it to be, but there was nothing I could do about that. Stopping hockey meant letting the pain grip me, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.

“Every day you make a choice to play hockey,” she said.

I stared back out at the trees instead of answering. A boy in a navy hoodie crossed the parking lot with a hockey bag almost as big as he was, and for exactly as long as it took him to turn sideways, I saw Ethan in him, thirteen and gangly and always half a step behind, trying to keep up. Then the boy turned all the way, and he was just some kid with a bag too heavy for him, and the resemblance went with him.

“If I stop, Ethan doesn’t get to play anymore.”

I could still remember lacing Ethan’s skates myself, double-knotting them because he hadn’t learned yet, him complaining they were too tight while I told him that was the point, the gap where his front tooth used to be showing every time he laughed at me for fussing. Fifteen-year-old Gideon had made a mistake and cost Ethan his life.

I deserved to live this life filled with pain.

I needed to change the subject.

Searched for something new to talk about.

“I met someone interesting a few days ago.”

Ryan, with two stacking chairs wedged under each arm, apologizing before he’d even finished knocking into me, glancing at Walker and shrinking in on himself before Finn asked him for coffee. He’d lit up then, and the small wave he’d given me on his way out the door had been so…

Cute?

“You did?”