Page 5

The next words came more slowly.

I wish you had known me this way. I wish I had known myself this way when you loved me. Maybe next week we’ll stand beside our friends and manage to be polite. Maybe you’ll look through me. Maybe I’ll discover that the version of you I’ve carried for fifteen months no longer exists anywhere except these letters.

Whatever happens, I won’t ask you to make it easier for me. You already opened enough doors. I’m finally brave enough to walk through them alone.

I still miss you when something is beautiful…

I think I always will.

Charm

I read the letter once.

The ache came quietly, spreading beneath my ribs without stealing the air from my lungs. I folded the paper, slid it into an envelope, and wrote his name across the front in the careful script I had practiced for months.

Then I placed it inside the hatbox with the others.

The box was nearly full. Hundreds of versions of me waited beneath the lid, each one loving the same man from a different place in my recovery. Ryan would never read them. They had never been written to bring him back.

They existed because losing him changed me, loving him shaped me, and pretending otherwise would’ve been another form of hiding.

I returned the hatbox to the floor and finished the cake while the sun set over Kimball Falls.

One week from tonight, I would see Ryan again. My heart raced when I imagined it, but panic didn’t follow. I didn’t cry, punish myself, or search for a reason to become smaller before he looked at me.

I carried my empty plate into the kitchen, restarted the Spanish lesson, and repeated the sentence until my pronunciation sounded almost right.

“Este pastel es para mí.”

This cake was for me.

So was the life waiting around me.

1

Ryan

Michigan looked exactly the same from the air.

Gray-blue water stretched beneath the plane while patches of late spring green broke through the clouds around Detroit. Roads cut between neighborhoods I recognized, and the closer we descended, the more my body remembered things my mind had spent fifteen months learning how to carry without reacting.

My hand flexed against my thigh.

The scars across my knuckles had faded from pink to pale silver, but they tightened whenever the weather changed. Four broken bones, two surgical pins, months of rehabilitation, and one professional hockey organization willing to invest in a left wing who reported early because he punched a marble counter an hour after signing his contract.

Milwaukee knew the official version. They’d heard several others before deciding which one belonged to me.

The Inferno’s medical staff knew how I broke my hand, where it happened, and what the injury cost Flint’s season. The team therapist knew considerably more because mandatory counseling became one of the conditions attached to my early reporting date. I spent my first months in Milwaukee sitting across from a man named David, who wore expensive loafers without socks and waited through silence better than anyone I’d ever met.

He never asked me to forgive Charm.

That was probably why I kept going after the mandatory sessions ended. Therapy didn’t make me less of an asshole. It gave me expensive language for why I was one.

It taught me that anger could become an identity if I fed it long enough, grief didn’t disappear when rage stopped covering it, and cutting someone out of my life didn’t remove the memory they left behind.

I already knew the last one.

Every room I entered had spent fifteen months proving it.