Page 11 of Knottingley Ever After
I have spent five years not hearing it.
I do not turn around.
I physically cannot. My body has locked itself out. Because if I turn, then it's real—then the man I once believed would personally escort me through the gates of the league, the man who built me and thenvanished,no note, no call, no goodbye, nothing but a Declan-shaped hole where my whole future used to stand—that he'shere.
In this corridor.
Breathing the same overpriced, Alpha-thick air as me.
I keep my eyes nailed to the administration door.
Voss and Brennan, predictably, fold like cheap lawn chairs.
"All right, all right." Voss steps back, hands raised, the laugh now sour. "C'mon, Declan. You never get in the middle of anything. Since when do you care?"
"Maybe he's being generous," Brennan says, sliding aside with a smirk I can hear without looking. "Sparing her the tryout.Real mercy, that—better she finds out now than in front of a crowd."
They both think that's tremendous.
I let them have the last laugh, because it's the last thing of mine they're getting today.
The doorway is clear.
I make my legs work. I walk—even, unhurried, the duffel riding my shoulder and the signed stick under my arm and my hometown written down the shaft of it in somebody's marker—straight between them and through the door, and I do not look back.
Not at Voss. Not at Brennan.
Not athim.
The door swings shut behind me. Heavy. Solid. A good, final sound.
And then, because I am only made of so much granite, and apparently the supplier shorted me, I let myself stop.
One breath.
Just one.
There's a window set into the door. A small rectangle of reinforced glass, the kind with wire mesh threaded through it, the kind every rink in the world seems contractually required to install.
I shouldn't.
I absolutely should not.
I look anyway.
And there he is.
Five years older and somehow not aged so much asdeepened,the way good wood does. Six-foot-four, exactly as my memory filed him, except the silver at his temples has spread—won ground—and there are lines now at the corners of his eyes that the boy I remember didn't have to earn.
Black athletic jacket. Gloves in one hand. Snow still melting on his shoulders in dark, scattered stars, because the sky chose today, of all days, to come down soft and white and pretty over the worst reunion of my life.
Declan O'Rourke.
He isn't looking at Voss. He isn't looking at Brennan, who are already drifting off down the hall, their amusement curdling in the cold.
He's looking at the door.
At the window.
