Page 104 of Wild Card 13

“She has ignored every single onboarding procedure.”

“Maybe your procedures are flawed.”

Lucy bent to untangle the leash, and the dog immediately tried to kiss her face. “My procedures are excellent.”

“They are very intimidating procedures for someone with paws.”

“She needs structure.”

“She needs a union rep.”

Lucy shot me a look.

I bit back a smile because it did not belong there. Not really. Not with all that space between us filled with things neither one of us had touched yet. But the dog wagged like she’d fixed something.

Lucy straightened with the leash gathered more tightly in her hand. “This is exactly why I can’t do this.”

The smile left me. “What?”

“This.” She gestured between us, small and frustrated. “You. Me. The way you make everything feel…” Her voice thinned, and she looked down at the dog. “Easy.”

I could not breathe.

Easy.That had been us once.Before everything got complicated. Before distance. Before hockey. Before every choice I’d made because I thought I was doing the right thing and every choice she’d made because I’d taught her not to trust me.

“I’m not trying to make it easy,” I said. “We live in the same town, work for the same team. I am just trying to make it less awkward.”

Her laugh was quiet and humorless. “That’s the problem, Ty. You don’t have to try.”

The name hit different when she said it like that. Not sharp. Not cold. Tired. Like she had been carrying it too long.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.

Something flickered across her face. Pain. There and gone. “You already did.”

I deserved it, but it was still a puck to the cheek. “I know.”

“No.” She shook her head once. “I don’t think you do. I think you know the outline. I think you know the polite, convenientversion where we were young and it ended and time passed and now we’re supposed to be mature adults who can stand on opposite sides of an arena and pretend history is a scheduling conflict.”

“Lucy—”

“You broke my heart into such small pieces that some still aren’t done healing.”

My throat closed.

The dog leaned against her shin, tail sweeping over the frosted grass.

Lucy looked at me then, and there was no armor left in her eyes. None. Just the truth, raw and exhausted and so much worse because she was not trying to wound me with it.

She was trying to survive me.

“I can’t risk that again,” she admitted. “I might not be able to put myself back together.”

I took one step toward her before I remembered I had no right.

Everything in me wanted to argue. To tell her I was not the same kid. To tell her I knew what I’d done, even if she didn’t know all of it. To tell her I had spent years losing her in different ways and still woke up reaching for the ghost of her sometimes.

But she wasn’t asking for a defense. She was drawing a line.