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“Six weeks is a long time to carry something that size alone,” he says.

“That’s the part.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. “That’s the whole part, Beau. Not the pregnancy. I can — I don’t even fully know what I feel about the pregnancy yet, honestly, it’s too big, I haven’t gotten there. It’s the six weeks. She sat in my mom’s kitchen and let Laney ask if she was eating enough, and she already knew. She went to the Conference Finals knowing. She’s been managing it, hiding it, running her whole life around it, and I didn’t get a single say in any of it until she’d already decided how the whole thing was going to go.”

Beau is quiet for a moment, letting that land before he responds.

“You know what I think about, watching you two this whole season?” he says. “I’ve watched Sloane learn to trust me with hard things, and it took her a long time, because she’d been burned before by people who didn’t handle what she gave them carefully. Margo’s spent her whole life being the person other people don’t have to worry about. That’s not the same wound as Sloane’s, but it comes from the same place — somewhere along the way, somebody taught her that carrying things alone was safer than handing them to someone else.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

“I’m not saying it’s okay.” Beau’s voice stays even, no defensiveness in it. “I’m saying I don’t think you’re actually angry at her for being pregnant. I think you’re angry because the way she handled it hit the exact bruise you’ve had since you were fifteen. And that’s real, and you’re allowed to feel it. I just don’t want you confusing the two things — being hurt by how she told you, and thinking she doesn’t love you or doesn’t want this with you. Those aren’t the same problem.”

“I hear you.” Beau’s quiet for a second, choosing his words. “Can I say something you might not want to hear right now?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re allowed to be furious about the six weeks. That’s fair. That’s completely fair, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you it isn’t.” He looks at me steady, the specific captain-quality attention he brings to things that actually matter. “But do you understand why she did it? Not whether it was right. Whether you understand the why.”

I don’t answer right away.

“She’s spent her whole life being the one who manages everything so nobody else has to carry it,” Beau says. “That’s not an excuse. It’s still the wrong call, and I think some part of her already knows that, or she wouldn’t have finally told you at all. But it’s not the same thing as your dad deciding something for you because he doesn’t actually care what it costs you. She was terrified of costing you something. That’s a different kind of wrong than the kind you’re used to.”

“It doesn’t feel different right now.”

“I know it doesn’t.” He claps a hand on my shoulder, brief, grounding. “It probably won’t for a while. I’m not telling you to feel differently tonight. I’m just telling you there’s a difference, and eventually you might want it available to you.”

I don’t say anything else. He doesn’t push for more. We sit there a while longer, the house quiet around us, and eventually he gets up, claps my shoulder once more on his way out, and leaves me alone with the tablet and the unfinished armor plating and the whole impossible shape of what my life looks like now.

I pick up my phone around midnight.

I open the thread with her name at the top, my thumb hovering over the keyboard, and I start typing before I’ve fully decided what I’m typing.

I’m still —

I stop. Delete it. Start again.

I don’t know what to say yet but I —

Delete that too. Everything I try sounds either too small for what happened or too big for what I’m actually ready to say, and I sit there in the dark with three false starts already erased and no idea how to finish a fourth.

Then her name lights up the screen. Not a message I’m composing — one arriving.

I know you’re not ready to talk. I just need you to know I’m not going anywhere, whether you want me to or not. I love you. I’m sorry. That’s all I needed to say tonight.

I read it four times. My thumb hovers over the reply field, and I almost — I get close, close enough that I can feel the shape of a response building somewhere behind my ribs — and then I don’t send anything at all. I just set the phone face-down on the nightstand and lie back and stare at the ceiling until sleep finds me somewhere well past two in the morning.

I don’t delete her message. That’s the only thing I let myself decide tonight. I don’t delete it, and I don’t block it, and some part of me that isn’t ready to say so out loud already knows what that means.

Practice the next morning is a blur I mostly get through on muscle memory.

I’m not sharp. Coach doesn’t say anything during the session, but I catch him watching me twice — the specific quiet observation of a man who’s spent a career reading bodies for tells, the same instinct Laney has, the same one that runs through everyone in my life who’s ever actually paid attention. I miss a read I wouldn’t normally miss. I take a lazy penalty I’d never normally take. By the end of the session I’m not sure I’ve had a single clean shift.

Cash notices too, though he doesn’t say anything directly — just skates a little closer to me during drills than usual, the specific unspoken solidarity of a guy who doesn’t know what’s wrong but has decided to be nearby anyway. Wyatt says nothing at all, same as always, but he taps my shoulder pad twice on the way off the ice, which from Wyatt is practically a speech.

Coach calls me into his office after, which isn’t unusual — he does one-on-ones with guys periodically, nothing alarming about the summons on its own — but the way he says it, low and direct, tells me this isn’t a routine check-in.

“Sit,” he says, when I get there.

I sit.