Page 21 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
“You’re early,” she says, tilting her cheek toward me as I pass. I kiss it. She smells like Earl Grey and Jergens lotion and every safe thing I’ve ever known.
She sets down her pen. Studies me. Maureen Benson has been a nurse at Regions Hospital for twenty-two years, and she can diagnose a problem at forty paces. I have never successfully lied to this woman. Not once.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Beckett Michael Benson.”
Full name. I’m cooked.
“I saw Everly Hart at the gala.” I say it fast, like yanking off a Band-Aid. “Coach’s daughter.”
Mom’s face softens. “Everly? The little girl with the red hair.”
“She doesn’t have red hair anymore.” Dark bob. Freckles and glasses and a laugh that’s still rattling around my rib cage three days later. “She’s a writer now.”
“Really?”
“She writes crime thrillers.”
“Hmm.” My mom takes a sip of her tea, peeking at me curiously. “How was it? Seeing her?”
I take to pulling ingredients out of the fridge. Chicken. Lemons. Capers. Start rinsing without looking at her. “I mistook her for a waitress.”
“You what?”
“I thought she was waitstaff.” I slice a lemon with more force than it deserves. “And then Coach reintroduced us, and it was—imagine the worst conversation you’ve ever had, then light it on fire and push it off a cliff.”
Mom’s brows shoot upward. “She always was a spitfire.”
I shoot her a look. Is she laughing? “It’s not funny, Mom. She hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you?—”
“No, she does. Coach asked me to drive her home, and I offered to take her out to Ironclad for a cookie, and she just about threw herself from the moving car. That girl hates me.” I put the knife down before I lose a finger. I let out a sigh. “I don’t really blame her. I pretty much told her to get over it when her parents were splitting up. And then I sprayed ice in her face at that showcase.”
“I remember.” Her voice goes quiet. “Her father was spending a lot of long evenings at the rink. I remember her mother, Katherine. I saw her crying in the parking lot one night, sitting in her car with the engine running. It was a hard time for them.”
“And Everly blamed me.”
“Everly was hurting and needed someone to blame, Beck.”
I stare at the lemon in my hand, the juice running over my knuckles. “She wasn’t wrong. Coach did choose hockey. And I stood there and soaked it up because I needed him, and I didn’t care what it cost her.”
“You were a child who’d lost his father. You were looking for one.” Her voice is steady, immovable. “That is not a crime, Beckett.”
Mom reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine. Calluses from twenty-two years of twelve-hour shifts. The thin gold wedding band she’s never taken off. “You can’t go back. You can only go forward and be different.”
“What if she doesn’t want me to go forward anywhere near her?”
“Then you respect that.” She squeezes. “You apologize and move on. All you can do is hold your head up and be the man God made you to be.”
Sort of wish I knew who that might be. But I don’t say that. Mom has always had this deep, rock-solid faith. Mine is more like a pebbly beach, shifting too easily.
We eat dinner, and she tells me all about a patient who sang show tunes at three a.m. in the cardiac ward—full voice, jazz hands. I tell her about practice, about almost rocketing a puck through Wyatt’s head.
“Oh, Beckett!” she gasps, her laugh bubbling up. “That’s terrible.”
