Page 94 of Cross Ice

“I don’t have a problem with it.” He said it firmly, the way he said things he needed me to actually hear. “I want to be clear about that. Who you are, who you’re with—that’s not the issue. The issue is that you didn’t tell me. That you thought you couldn’t.”

“I didn’t think I couldn’t. I just… wasn’t ready. For a long time, I wasn’t ready, and then it had been so long that I didn’t know how to start the conversation.”

“You start it by starting it.” His voice was gruff. “That’s all. You just start it.”

I almost said I know and stopped myself. “You’re right.”

A long pause.

“I need some time,” he said. Not a rejection—the tone was clear on that. “Not to decide anything. And not from you. I just need time to… adjust to what I didn’t know. To figure out how I missed it for so long.” A beat. “That’s not on you. That’s just me needing time.”

“Take whatever you need.”

“But I want you calling more. Not just when something blows up.” His voice roughened further. “I want my son calling his father.”

“I’ll call more. I promise.”

“Good.” He let a beat go. “This Evan. He’s good to you?”

“Yeah, Dad. He’s good to me.”

“All right.” The roughness hadn’t left his voice, but it had settled. “All right.”

My mother came back on. “We’ll come up next month. Or we’ll see you at your next game in LA or Anaheim. We’ll figure it out in person… all of it.”

“Okay.”

“Te quiero, Nicolás.”

“Te quiero, Mom.”

I hung up and sat there for a while. My eyes were wet. I hadn’t noticed when that started.

My mother had kept a door open for years that I’d never walked through. My father had sat across from me at dinner tables and holiday visits and summer trips without knowing something fundamental about his son. Not because he’d given me a reason to hide it, but because I’d been hiding it so long that I’d stopped questioning whether I still needed to.

That was the part that sat heaviest. Not the photos, not the media, not the way the story was already spinning out across the internet with its own momentum. The part that sat heaviest was the years. All the moments I could have chosen differently and didn’t.

I wasn’t going to be able to fix that with a phone call.

It was going to take a while.

I had a lot of ground to make up. With my family, with Evan, with all of it. None of it was going to happen overnight.

But I knew where I was starting. With Evan.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Nico

I woke up Sunday morning to Evan still asleep beside me and forty-three unread texts on my phone.

I eased out of bed without waking him and went to the kitchen. Made coffee. Stood at the counter, scrolling through the damage while the machine hissed and gurgled.

My agent, Neil. The Lasers’ PR manager, Rachel. André three times. Griffin. A dozen teammates. Sports reporters I’d never heard of asking for comment.

And at the top of my email, time-stamped at 6:04 a.m., VortexStride’s legal team.

I didn’t need to read it. I knew what it said.