Page 139 of Offside

Kasperi went back to his gear with considerable focus.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Cole said, “Okay,” quietly, the performance fully gone. “So it’s like that.”

“It’s like that.”

Cole nodded slowly. “I called it in October, for the record.”

“You called it in September,” Eli said with a gruff chuckle.

“I did call it in September,” Cole agreed. “I just didn’t say anything because it wasn’t my business.” He paused. “It’s a little bit my business now since I had to stand on that ice while Calloway told us all to get our heads out of our asses.” He said it without rancor. Just fact, the way we talked to each other. “Go fix it with Griffin tonight. And then—” He stopped. “What’s the plan with Maren?”

“Go tell her what I should have told her weeks ago.”

“Which is?” he asked like he didn’t know.

I looked at him.

“Right,” Cole said. “Still not saying it here.”

“Still not saying it here.”

“Fair enough.” Cole stood up and clapped me once on the shoulder, Cole looked at his skates, then back at me. “The order matters. Griffin first, then her.”

“I know the order.” These guys had become my friends, even though I’d lied to them, and they seemed to care about me, about Maren.

“Do you? Because you’ve been sitting in your skates for fifteen minutes. And you’ve got a lot to do tonight.”

I reached down and finally started unlacing.

I pulled the second skate off and set it down.

I thought about Maren in her car last night. About the text she hadn’t responded to. How she chose to come back even when she was furious, because that was who she was. I had spent five months watching her be that person and it was past time to be the same one back.

I got up and grabbed my towel.

Behind me, Cole said something to Danny that made the younger player laugh, and then Theo said something in French to Eli, and the locker room came back to life. The irreplaceable noise of people who had been through something together and were going to keep going through it. I stood under the hot water and thought about what I was going to say to Griffin Callahan in less than a few hours.

I’d figure it out on the way over.

I always figured it out.

CHAPTER 26

MAREN

I changed out of my work clothe, pulling on an old T-shirt and shorts and went outside.

The back patio was my favorite part of the house. I’d bought it partly for this. The wide flagstone, the low wall, the scrubland stretching out behind it with the mountains in the distance going purple in the afternoon heat. I put my feet up on the wall and my phone face-down on the table beside me and stayed there, doing nothing, which I was terrible at and which I needed badly.

The desert had an atmosphere in the early afternoon I’d been trying to describe my whole life. The way the light went flat and white and the shadows got sharp and the air had a dry weight to it that pressed down without being unpleasant, like the world was asking you to slow down and you had no choice but to comply. I’d grown up with it and moved away briefly for school and come back, and every time I sat in it I understood again why I’d come back. There was something clarifying about a landscape that offered no illusions. The desert was exactly what it was. I’d always respected that.

A hawk was circling over the scrubland. Lazy, riding the wind with absolute confidence. I watched it for a while.

The past week had been one of the stranger ones of my adult life. Not the worst. I’d had worse. But this week had the grinding exhaustion of caring enormously about multiple things simultaneously and being unable to do anything about any of them. I’d been professional at work and composed at home and privately furious at everyone including myself, and I was tired. I was tired of being the person who held it together in every room I walked into.

I picked up my phone and opened my texts with Griffin.

Maren: Have you talked to him yet?