Page 244 of Wild Card 13

I rounded the bend near the old shoreline access, where the road narrowed and the lake opened wider on my left. There were houses tucked back from the water, their windows dark, roofs loaded with snow. When I was a kid, before any of us knew what hockey might turn into, Grandpa Hal used to bring us out here when the ice was thick enough. Kendrick complaining because Thane took everything too seriously. Thane pretending not to care that I was faster. Me falling because I was looking at the puck instead of where my skates were going.

Grandma Ruth had stood on the shore in a coat that made her look twice her size, holding a thermos and yelling, “If one of you breaks a wrist, I am not explaining this to your mother.”

Then she had poured us hot chocolate with extra marshmallows like she was not the one who had packed our skates in the first place.

Love, in my family, had always come with warnings and food.

I ran harder for the last hill, the air cutting against my face. My thighs burned. My pulse steadied. The house appeared between the trees as I crested the rise, all glass and dark siding, porch light glowing gold against the snow. It looked permanent from out here. Like the kind of place a man bought when he understood what home meant.

I had bought it before I understood much of anything.

Back then, I thought staying in Northbend would be enough. A lake house. A contract. A number on a jersey kids wore into grocery stores. I thought if I built enough proof around myself, eventually it would become a life.

Then Lucy had walked into my house weeks ago and made the whole place feel unfinished.

My watch whirred against my wrist at the end of the driveway.

Seven miles.

I slowed to a walk, hands on my hips, breath coming hard and white in the cold.

Paper Lantern opened its doors to the regulars at six, but Naomi had learned my schedule by day three and started leaving Lucy’s order ready if I texted from the truck.

Lucy had not thanked me in any clean way. She had acceptedthe coffee with guarded little comments, one eyebrow raised, like every morning was a hearing and I was presenting evidence.

“Your accomplice did well today,” she had said on Wednesday.

“Naomi is a professional,” I had told her.

“Naomi is a traitor.”

Dottie had been licking whipped cream from the cup at Lucy’s feet, tail sweeping the rug like a metronome of betrayal.

I had left after that. Every morning. Threshold. Coffee. Pup cup.

Some mornings, she looked at the cup like she wanted to trust it.

Some mornings, she looked at me like she hated that she wanted to.

One morning did not earn me anything. A week did not earn me anything. However many mornings we had stacked together, quiet and careful, still did not make a promise. It only made a pattern.

I was trying not to get cocky about a pattern.

Inside, the house was warm and too quiet. I showered fast, changed into team sweats, and made the bed because my mother had raised me with standards and guilt in equal measure. By five ten, I was in my truck with wet hair tucked beneath a snapback, the heater blasting, headed toward Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Hal’s place with my stomach already awake.

Their house sat on a corner lot in the older part of Northbend, the kind of neighborhood where people had lived long enough to know who shoveled late and who left Christmas lights up too long. The porch light was on when I pulled in. It was always on when Grandma knew one of us was coming.

I let myself in through the mudroom.

“Don’t track half the county in here,” Grandma called from somewhere deeper in the house.

“I missed you too.”

Grandpa Hal sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper folded into a square beside his coffee, even though I knew for a fact he read most of the news on his tablet before Grandma came downstairs. The paper was theater. Grandpa liked props.

Grandma Ruth stood at the stove in a plaid robe and slippers, her silver hair pinned back with the kind of clip that had survived decades of family emergencies, holidays, and whatever happened the year Kendrick tried to deep-fry a turkey. She was small enoughthat people who did not know her made the mistake of assuming she could be moved.

People who knew her understood that Ruth Burns had been born with a center of gravity stronger than weather. I crossed the kitchen and kissed her cheek.