Page 135 of Wild Card 13

“Then I’ll be here at seven forty-five.”

“You have to confirm the recovery change first.”

“I will.”

“And you cannot arrive at seven fifty-three and argue that it is functionally the same time.”

“It’s eight minutes.”

“It is late.”

“It is aggressively close.”

“It’s still late.”

His eyes lifted toward mine, bright with the familiar impulse to argue simply because I had given him something solid to push against. For a flash in time, he looked exactly like the boy from the library. Long legs beneath a table too small for him. Pencil tapping. Smile already forming because irritating me had once been his favorite way to spend an afternoon.

The memory hit with enough softness to hurt.

Then a muted squeak came from beside my chair. Both of us looked down. Dottie had abandoned her position against my legs and selected a stuffed green frog from her toy basket. She stood in the narrow space between the desk and Ty’s chair, the frog hanging crookedly from her mouth. Her gaze fixed on him.

Ty looked at me. “Am I being summoned?”

“She is offering a temporary diplomatic agreement.”

“To me?”

“Try not to let it affect your ego.”

He held one hand out. Dottie stepped forward and dropped the frog directly onto his shoe. Ty’s face changed. It happened so quickly and so honestly that I almost looked away. His smile softened. His shoulders loosened. He bent to pick up the toy with both hands as though she had presented him with something breakable instead of a fabric amphibian damp with dog saliva.

“Thank you,” he told her seriously. Dottie leaned against his shin. Ty rubbed one hand slowly over the long velvet fold of her ear. Dottie’s eyes drifted halfway closed, her body settling against him with complete trust.

He had always been like this. That was the part I had spent years trying not to remember.

Not the noise. Not the lateness. Not the endless ability to turn one harmless sentence into a ten-minute argument because he liked watching me fight not to smile.

The quiet version of him that appeared when nobody asked. The boy who carried extra gloves in his truck because someone was always cold. The one who stayed after practice to help younger players gather pucks. The one who could make an entire room look at him and still somehow notice the single person trying to disappear.

Ty scratched gently beneath Dottie’s chin before placing the frog beside his gym bag. Then he looked up at me. “How many of the kids have never been here before?”

I swallowed once. “Seventeen.”

He nodded and pulled the packet back toward him.

For the next several minutes, we worked through the remainder of the schedule without incident.

Ty asked about the family lounge and whether siblings would beallowed onto the ice. I explained that younger siblings could participate in the off-ice activities but needed to remain with a parent or guardian. He wanted to know how the rotation groups had been organized, whether Alois would stay at one station or move between them, and what would happen if a child became overwhelmed midway through an activity.

The questions were practical. Specific. Nothing like the half-interested responses I had expected when he first tilted back in that chair with his phone in his hand.

By the time we reached the emergency procedures, he had covered two pages of the packet with handwritten notes. His handwriting had not improved since high school.

I watched him underline the contact number for the Mighty Blades coordinator, the letters slanting across the margin with the same reckless disregard for straight lines he brought to almost everything else.

“Is that supposed to say Hannah Lindstrom?” I asked.

Ty looked down at the page. “Obviously.”