Page 278 of Wild Card 13

“You don’t have to pretend you’re okay,” I said.

For a second, the hallway seemed to empty around us. The whole arena reduced itself to rain-streaked windows, old ice, my dog licking whipped cream from her nose, and Ty Burns standing at the edge of my office with a loss sitting heavy on his shoulders.

His eyes came back to mine. “I’m not.”

The honesty was quiet enough to hurt.

I swallowed. “Do you want to come in for a minute?”

“Yeah, sure.” Ty stood near the door at first, careful even with permission. He looked around my office the way people did when they realized a room had changed while they were not watching. “It looks good in here,” he said.

“You sound surprised.”

“I’m not.” His gaze moved over the lamp, the bookshelves, the framed brunch photo, Dottie’s bed. “It feels like you.”

I turned toward my desk and busied myself with absolutely nothing.

He did not sit until I nodded toward the chair across from mine. Even then, he lowered himself into it like he expected someone to tell him he had misunderstood. His knees were too long for the space. His shoulders filled too much of the room. The navy suit made his eyes look painfully blue and his exhaustion harder to miss.

Ty stared at his hands. The old Ty had always known what to do with silence. Fill it. Charm it. Turn it into something easy before it could become honest. This Ty let it sit.

“Was it bad?” I asked finally.

He rubbed his thumb over the knuckle of his other hand. “Last night was bad.” His jaw flexed. “I had a chance in the second,” he growled. “Clean. Should’ve buried it.”

“Ty.”

“And I took a bad angle on their third.”

“You were not the only player on the ice.”

“No.” His voice stayed even. “But I was one of them.”

I did not know what to do with that. Comfort felt too intimate. Dismissing it felt cruel. Letting it stand felt like leaving him alone in it. I wrapped both hands around my coffee. “My father was upset for all of you,” I said.

Ty looked up.

“He won’t say it like that,” I added. “He’ll say something about offseason evaluation and organizational growth because he has a disease that prevents normal emotional vocabulary before noon.”

Ty’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “Sounds like him.”

“He believes in this team.”

“I know.”

“He believes in you.”

Ty looked away toward the window. For a moment, the rain reflected in his eyes and made them look brighter than they were. “I don’t know if I earned that last night.”

There were so many things I could have said. That one game did not define him. That hockey was brutal. That everyone missed chances. That the world did not end because a puck hit a post. But Ty did not need me to hand him a motivational poster. So I said, “Maybe you don’t have to earn it every single night for it to be real.”

The sentence hung between us, too big for hockey and too close to everything else.

His eyes came back to mine slowly.

I looked down at my cup. “I had a good time with you at the baby shower.” I forced myself to keep going, because if I stopped there, I would turn it into less than it was. “With Dottie. And the kids. And Bobby. The whole stroller disaster.”

A little breath left him, almost a laugh but not quite. “That was a disaster.”