Page 64 of Filthy Goalie
I had chosen this. I had made this particular choice with every hour that passed without saying the words. And now I was paying for it with the particular kind of loneliness that only a man who had lost everything could understand.
The door between them was closed. The door would probably stay closed. And I understood that I deserved every second of what came next.
I thought about driving away. I thought about calling Maddox and telling him to find another goalie coach, another man to fill the role. I thought about getting into my truck and driving south and never coming back to Frostbite Falls. I thought about disappearing the way I had arrived—quietly, without explanation, leaving only a trail of secrets behind me.
But I was not going to do that. I was going to stay. I was going to sit in the apartment above her garage and I was going to wait. I was going to count the days until she was ready to see me. I was going to accept that I had broken her trust and that no amount of waiting or silence or patience was going to fix it. I was going to understand that some things, once broken, could never be repaired the way they were before.
This was the price of my secrets. This was the cost of my silence. This was the consequence of deciding to protect someone by lying to them.
And I was going to live with it.
I understood that dawn was coming. The light outside the window was beginning to shift from black to the particular shade of dark blue that came just before the sun arrived. In a few hours, it would be Day 29. It would be morning. It would be the day after I had lost her.
I had told her the truth. I had confessed the lie. I had given her the information she needed to make her own decisions about what came next. And she had closed the door and she had locked me out and I had deserved every second of it.
This was the architecture of the truth: it came too late, and it came with the weight of all the moments where it should have been said and was not. The truth was not redemptive when itarrived after the lie had already grown roots. The truth was just the final piece of the destruction.
I sat on the couch in the dark apartment and I understood that this was my penance. This was my particular punishment for thirteen days of silence. This was the cost of keeping secrets with people you loved.
And as the sun started to come up over Frostbite Falls, I understood that I was going to sit here alone for however long it took. Days. Weeks. Months. It did not matter. The waiting was part of the punishment. The waiting was part of accepting what I had done.
The door was closed. She was on the other side of it. And I was going to deserve every moment of this particular loneliness.
The snow continued to fall outside the window. The town of Frostbite Falls was waking up to Day 29. People were going to work. People were going to the diner. People were going to their lives and they did not know that a man was sitting alone in an apartment above a garage, counting the seconds until the woman I loved might decide to forgive me.
I thought about the particular cruelty of time. Time was supposed to heal things. Time was supposed to make loss manageable. But time was also the thing that extended punishment. Time was the thing that made waiting unbearable. Time was the particular enemy of men who deserved their own loneliness.
I picked up my phone. I thought about calling her. I thought about saying one more word, one more explanation, one more apology. But I understood that words were what had gotten me into this. Silence had gotten me into this. The particular combination of words left unspoken and secrets held close had destroyed everything.
So I did not call. I did not text. I did not try to reach out or explain or defend myself. I simply sat in the apartment andI waited. I sat in the cold and I understood that this was where I belonged. Here. Alone. Waiting for a forgiveness that might never come.
The sun rose over Frostbite Falls. The day began. And I sat on the couch and I counted the hours until I could see her again, knowing that when I did, she might not want to see me at all.
This was the work of the morning. This was the cost of secrets. This was the beginning of a very long wait.
19
MAPLE
Day 29
I opened the diner at 5 a.m. and I did not think about Knox.
I told myself I was not thinking about Knox as I pulled espresso shots. I told myself I was not thinking about Knox as I counted out the register. I told myself I was not thinking about Knox as the first customers came in—Dale, the cook, who had worked with my grandmother for twenty-three years and did not ask why I looked like I had not slept. The regulars at the counter, who did not say anything, who just ate their eggs and left big tips like they were trying to buy permission to be kind to me.
Mira texted at 8:30 a.m.:Talk?
I texted back:Not yet.
Knox did not come into the diner.
I knew he would not. I knew that he was at the rink, working with goalies, doing the thing that he did, the thing that allowed him to pretend that his life was not imploding fifty feet from the woman he loved. I knew that his schedule was deliberately notoverlapping with mine, that we had settled into a choreography of avoidance that was becoming more precise with every passing hour. We were not running into each other at the gas station. We were not crossing paths at the post office. We were not even in the parking lot at the same time. The town, noticing our separate lives, had learned to adjust around our pain.
At the rink, he was probably thinking about saves and angles and the particular physics of a puck moving at eighty miles per hour. At the diner, I was thinking about the same thing. I was thinking about how to hold onto something that was trying to get away, how to save something that was falling, how to construct a defense against the feeling that I had been a fool.
At 3:47 p.m., Theo Jr.came in with his mother.
Heather said, “The usual?”
