Mag-log inThe next morning, Miles extended his arm.Fifteen years old. Charcoal suit that Richard had specified in the logistics spreadsheet down to the thread count. Dark eyes clear and as present as the man he was becoming – steady, honest, true, brave in the way that only people who’d been broken young and healed properly could be.“Ready, sis?”“Ready.”We walked with him walking BESIDE me. The way we’d always walked. Through the worst and the best and the ordinary middle where most of life actually happened. His arm under my hand. The brick path lined with my mom's candles.As we cleared the threshold, he leaned close. His mouth near my ear. The words small enough that only I could hear them.“I’m glad he kept coming back.”My throat closed and my eyes blurred as I squeezed his arm because my voice wasn’t available, and he squeezed back because he understood that language.Rhys was at the altar in his black tuxedo and his hair pushed back but still refusing to be tamed. His face was comple
The bar hadn’t changed. Same sticky walnut. Same neon beer signs casting amber across the brick. Same corner stool where a girl with ruined mascara sat two years ago and ordered something she couldn’t taste because the boy she’d loved for years had chosen someone else on Valentine’s Day.Same stool. Different girl.Rhys slid a drink across the bar deliberately. The motion identical to the first time. He’d perfected this move. Practised it, probably. A current annual recreation of the night that started everything.“You look like you’re having the kind of night that needs more than one.”I took the glass. The drink was different now – not the cheap whiskey from Valentine’s Day but something better, something he’d asked the bartender to prepare that tasted like he’d been paying attention to what I actually liked for two years instead of guessing.“I’m having the best night of my life,” I said.“You said that last year.”“I’ll say it next year too.”The bartender – same guy, thick beard
Mom saw the ring before I said a word. FaceTime connected and her eyes went straight to my left hand on the counter like she already knew what was happening.She dropped her dish towel and cried quietly. It felt like it was the healing kind that meant the walls of the last three years had finally finished coming down and what was left was a woman watching her daughter wear a gold band on a video call and knowing it was right.Richard’s response arrived six hours later in the form of a text.Congratulations. He chose well.Four words. I read them three times. In Richard Maddox’s vocabulary, that was a concession speech. An admission that the architecture his son built with the girl he’d tried to remove from the blueprint was stronger than the concrete fortress Richard spent twenty years maintaining. It meant I was wrong and I know it and I’m not going to say those words because I’m Richard, but these four words carry the same weight if you know how to read me and by now you should.I k
We were drinking the cheap champagne Cole had brought to the reading as a gift. We’d carried it home unopened because drinking in a bookstore basement felt wrong when the book was still warm in my hands.Rhys popped it in the kitchen with his left hand and the foam ran over his wrist, but neither of us reached for a towel.He poured two plastic cups because we didn’t own champagne glasses yet.“To the writer,” he said.I drank. Set the cup down. Pulled his mouth to mine.The sex was different from everything that came before it because we were celebrating this time.He lifted me onto the kitchen counter – our counter, the one I’d measured with my eyes during the apartment tour and he’d caught me doing it and said “I know what you’re doing” and I’d said “I don’t know what you’re talking about” – and I wrapped my legs around him and we laughed when the champagne fell off the edge and shattered on the tile.We moved to the bedroom – his hands on my hips steering me backward, my hands pul
A few days after. The bookstore smelled like damp cedar and newsprint. A cat was sleeping in the window upstairs. I was behind a small oak podium with my book between my hands.I was staring at the front row.Seven people crammed into folding chairs with their shoulders touching. Cole on the far left. Sienna beside him, already crying. Zara next with the faintest trace of a real smile. Then Mom. Between Miles and Elena.The arrangement that shouldn’t have been possible – the current wife and the ex-wife of Richard Maddox, sitting shoulder to shoulder on plastic chairs in a Portland basement. Miles in his varsity jacket, fingers tracing the edge of his jersey, the bridge between two versions of the same family.Richard on the far right. His hands flat on his knees. His eyes on the podium. He’d bought a ticket and a preorder copy and he was HERE.I looked to Rhys in the centre. Leather jacket. Hands in his pockets. Grey eyes tracking my face with an intensity that made the back of my ne
Miles was fifteen and three inches taller than the last time I’d seen him in person, which meant the hug at the airport arrivals gate involved me standing on my toes and him pretending not to notice.He was wearing the number seventeen jersey – not the old one from the championship, a new one, his own, the junior varsity version with ELLIS on the back because he’d earned the number through tryouts and not through anyone else’s name.He’d brought his gear. Of course he had. The visit was three days and he’d packed like he was relocating – sticks in a travel case, skates wrapped in his practice jersey, tape in three colours, because Rhys had told him over FaceTime that black tape was for forwards and white was for defencemen and Miles had said “what about blue” and Rhys had said “blue is for people who want to get chirped” and Miles had still packed blue anyway.Rhys rented ice time at the practice rink. An hour on a Tuesday morning when the building was empty and the lights were indust







