Page 222 of The Off Limits Captain
“If I send this, I’m in it,” I say.
“You were already in it,” he says. “This time your name is on your own terms.”
“Do not make me sentimental.”
“You’d edit it.”
He gets half a smile out of me.
I hit send.
It runs before dinner. Not about him. The long one — the one I came to Texas to write. My byline. My conflict on the page, where there is nothing left for anyone to expose. It makes people angry the way the true ones do.
I let him read it after. Not for permission. Because he is the person I tell things to now.
Round Two starts Thursday.
I will be in the building. Press box, broader assignment, my own credential this time, watching everything he cannot see from the ice and telling him about it after.
I came here for a story.
I am leaving with the byline, the credential, and him.
Their math, not mine.
Epilogue Peyton
Two weeks is not long enough to become someone new. It is long enough to stop pretending.
I know this because I am standing in Susan McAllister’s kitchen at seven in the morning, and nobody has asked me why.
It is not the porch light Dad—he keeps correcting me when I say Bill—leaves on now like it belongs to me too. It is not the chipped blue mug Lily assigned me without ceremony, the one that has quietly become mine. It is the way nobody makes a thing of it.
Susan is at the table, moving slower than she’d like, a rehab worksheet folded under her coffee like she believes no one will notice her ignoring it. She catches me noticing.
“Don’t,” she says.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You reported it with your face.”
I sit across from her. “Occupational hazard.”
She almost smiles. Two weeks ago I watched a clinician put a hand over his mouth in a hallway. Now she is stealing extra sugar when she thinks I am not looking, running the room from a kitchen chair the way she once ran it from a hospital bed. I have decided not to mention the sugar.
The Westwood piece ran ten days ago. The other story—the hockey one, the one with my disclosure high and my name where no one could use it against me—had already done its work. The Westwood fallout hasn’t stopped—two more parents came forward, a district lawyer sent a letter that used the word regrettable four times and apologized for nothing. Gil says Westwood is the best work I have done. I think it might be the first honest thing I have published in two years. Nobody’s byline is doing me any favors, and for once that feels like proof I got it right.
Ryan comes in from the cold with his hair damp and his bag already on his shoulder, because the season does not pause for anyone’s mother, and the drive back to San Antonio is long. He stops when he sees me at the table. He always stops, like the sight of me still surprises the plan out of him.
“You’re up,” he says.
“I’m always up. You’re just usually gone.”
“Working on it.” He kisses the top of Susan’s head, then mine, unhurried, in front of his family, in the full light of the kitchen, and does not manage it into something smaller.
He asked me to come home with him two weeks ago. I said okay. Most nights since, I have. Nobody has made me define it.
“Game Three is Thursday,” Lily announces from the doorway, wearing one of Ryan’s old jerseys as a dress. “Ryan’s gonna win the whole thing.”
