Page 164 of Wild Card 13

There it was. A way in.

Not one I could use. Not yet. But I saw it. I saw the way my family could still reach places in Lucy that I had been locked out of for years. I saw the way she remembered them with her whole body before she remembered to protect herself.

And because I was a selfish bastard, it made me hopeful.

Fraser moved past me carrying a collapsed folding table under one arm. “Good event,” he barked.

I looked at him automatically, like a kid looking for something I was too old to need. His eyes were on the room, not me. On Lucy talking quietly to the coordinator. On the kids still clustered by the glass. On the volunteers stacking bins.

He nodded once. “She ran it well.”

“Yeah,” I said again, quieter this time. “She did.”

Mom appeared near Lucy with her coat folded over one arm, and whatever she said made Lucy shake her head immediately.

Mom smiled anyway.

Oh, no.

I started toward them because I was not above wanting to be present when Marion Burns deployed full force.

“We’re going to Matt’s,” Mom said as I got close, warm as fresh coffee and twice as dangerous. “And Lucy, we’re not taking no for an answer.”

Lucy’s eyes widened. “I really should get back to the arena office.”

“Everything is packed,” Grandma Ruth piped in from behind her. “You have people.”

“I do have people,” Lucy said carefully.

Mom touched Lucy’s arm, gentle enough that Lucy could have stepped away and didn’t. “For old time’s sake.”

Lucy looked toward the rink. Toward the equipment table, the emptying boards, the space where the morning had happened and somehow worked. Then she looked at my mother, at Grandma Ruth, at Grandpa Hal still pretending his roster had not made half the adults in the room emotional, at Dad carrying another folded chair like usefulness was his native language.

Finally, she looked at me.

I held my breath like an idiot.

“Okay,” she sighed softly, handing the lanyards off to Sarah. “For old time’s sake.”

And just like that, I was eighteen again for half a second. Stupidly, dangerously, completely gone.

Snow followedour caravan from the arena to Matt’s, softening the sidewalks and clinging to the shoulders of Lucy’s coat by the time we reached the red awning from the road.

She stopped just outside the front windows, not because she didn’t know the place, but because she did.

I saw it hit her. The warm glow through the glass. The low blur of voices inside. The familiar shape of the bar beyond the condensation-fogged window. The kind of memory that didn’t need to announce itself before it put both hands around your throat.

For half a second, Lucy looked eighteen again. Like some part of her had stepped too close to a room where we had once belonged to each other without knowing how temporary that kind of belonging could be.

My family moved ahead around us in a loose cluster of coats and familiar noise. Grandma Ruth was already telling Grandpa not to track slush across the floor. Dad held the door for Mom. Nobody looked back.

Lucy blinked once, and the woman from Talon Arena returned by degrees. The straight shoulders. The careful chin. The hand smoothing the front of her coat like composure could be pressed back into place.

“Still hungry?” I asked, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

Her gaze slid to mine. “It’s Matt’s.”

“So that’s a yes?”