Page 103 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
I did. I thought exactly that.
“All those hymns I used to sing, they are prayers. And that one’s been my prayer for you for twenty-three years. Because I’ve been watching you carry a load that was never yours to carry. Skating laps at midnight. Training until your body breaks. Always fighting for the win.”
She lets go of my hand, lifting it to brush my cheek. A gesture long forgotten from my childhood.
“Rest isn’t quitting, Beckett. Rest isn’t weakness. Rest isn’t dishonoring your father or wasting my sacrifice or abandoning the sport.” Her voice is steady and fierce and gentle all at once—she would have made a great hockey coach with that voice. “Rest is trusting that you don’t have to be enough because God is.”
She gives me a small smile.
And I think I finally understand.
I’ve been weary. I’ve been burdened. I’ve been carrying a dead man’s imagined expectations for so long I mistook the exhaustion for purpose.
Come to me, all you who are weary.
I am weary. I’m so weary that the weariness has its own weariness. Weary of the performance and the press conferences and the blue line and the constant feeling that I’ll only ever be seen for the worst versions of myself. For my mistakes.
And I will give you rest.
“I don’t know how.” It’s the truest thing I’ve said all week. “I don’t know how to rest, Mom. I don’t know how to stop.”
She smiles. “Rest isn’t something you do, Beckett. It’s something you receive the way you receive grace. The way you receive love. By stopping long enough to let it find you.” She stands, picking up our mugs, hers empty, mine simply forgotten. She starts toward the kitchen and stops, turning back. “I’d start with prayer. That’s always a good place to begin.”
She disappears into the kitchen, leaving me to the quiet.
Start with prayer.
All right, here goes. I close my eyes and try to pray, try to pull the words from my heart, but…I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve prayed before…but somehow this feels different. As I sit in the golden lamplight of my mother’s living room, the silence makes me self-conscious. I feel ridiculous. Bare and vulnerable. I open my mouth. Close it again. Look at my hands.
Finally, quietly—barely above a breath, and maybe not even that—I say it.
“All right. I’m here. You told the weary and burdened to come to You.”
A pause.
“Well. Here I am.”
The quiet surrounds me, wrapping around my shoulders, holding me. And I just…wait.
It lasts maybe thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. A small eternity in a life that has been in constant motion. And in that minute—in the stopping, in the stillness, in my weary-and-burdened breaths—something shifts.
Not the hollow filling. Not the shame dissolving. Something quieter. The first millimeter of a hand beginning to open. The first breath of a man who has been holding his breath since he was eight years old.
And finally, it clicks.
I don’t have to be enough, because God is. And anything I try to substitute for that…no wonder they leave me hollow. Oh. I guess I do have things to say to God, starting with I’m sorry. And ending on…I need you.
I open my eyes, not surprised to find my mom standing there, that quiet smile on her lips.
“Thank you,” I say. “For leaving the light on.”
“Always.”
My apartment is quiet the way midnight is quiet—not peaceful, just empty. The city lights bleed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, pooling across the rug, across the coffee table, across the manuscript in my hands. Three hours. A glass of water untouched. The Minnesota night is cold and deep, but the stars are close.
I’ve been on page twenty-four for the last twenty minutes. Not because it’s slow—it isn’t. Because on page twenty-four, a man shows up, bursting onto the page with charm and genuine goodness. And somehow still painted as a villain just long enough for you to wonder if he might be.
He’s me. Sort of. He’s me in the way a reflection is you—reversed and slightly wrong, and yes, there are angles that seem brutally honest.
