Page 93 of Cross Ice

“Are you all right?” First thing. Before anything else.

“I’m okay.” I glanced at the window. Later than I’d realized, with the sky going the flat gray of early evening while I wasn’t paying attention. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”

“You’re calling now.” A pause. “That’s what matters.”

I could hear my father somewhere behind her—the scrape of a chair, the clink of a glass, the familiar rhythm of their kitchen on a Saturday evening. I knew exactly what it looked like. My mother at the counter, my father at the table. Thirty years of the same Saturday.

“Mom.” I stopped. Tried again. “I should have told you. Before any of this. A long time before any of this.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I’ve known for a while,” she said carefully. “Or… I’ve suspected. Since you were young.” She paused. “I tried to make sure you knew we were safe. That you could come to us. I kept waiting for you to be ready.”

“I know you did.” And I had known. That was the part I’d never let myself look at directly—that she’d left the door open and I’d walked past it for years. “I knew the door was open. That was never the question.”

“Then I don’t understand.” Her voice stayed gentle, but underneath, it pulled tight. “I keep thinking about all the years you were carrying this and I couldn’t help you. That you knew you were safe and still felt like you couldn’t—” She choked on the word. “I’m not angry, mijo. I’m heartbroken. That’s different.”

“I know.” I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth for a second. “It was about me. My own stuff. It had nothing to do with anything you did or didn’t do. You were everything you needed to be. I just… I built a wall around it a long time ago and I couldn’t figure out how to take it down.”

“Hockey,” she said quietly.

“Yeah. Hockey. And then the habit of it. And then it had been so long that coming out felt like… explaining years of silence I didn’t know how to account for.” I blew out a breath. “None of that is your fault.”

“It’s not about fault.” She let a beat pass. “It’s about my son thinking he had to hide from his own family.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“I love you,” she said, plain and simple. “That has never been complicated. Not for a single day.”

My throat tightened. “I know. I love you too.”

“Tell me about him. Evan.”

That surprised me—the directness of it. “Yeah?”

So I did. I told her he was sharp and quiet and noticed everything, that he made me slow down in a way nobody else managed. That he existed almost entirely outside my world—no hockey, no locker room, someone who’d ever seen my Wikipedia page—and that was exactly what I needed. That he saw me without any of it and stayed anyway. I talked longer than I meant to.

When I finished, she said, “He sounds like someone worth the trouble.”

“He is.”

“Then hold onto him.” A pause. “Your father wants to talk to you.”

A shuffle. Silence. Then my father cleared his throat. “Nico.”

“Hey, Dad.”

Quiet. My father had never been a man who filled silence for the sake of it.

“I saw the photos,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Direct. No preamble. That was my father—he’d skip the whole approach and go straight to the heart. “I keep trying to work it out and I can’t. I keep thinking… was there something I did? Something I said?”

“No. Dad, no. It was nothing you did.”

“Then I don’t—” He halted. Started again. “I didn’t know something important about my son. That’s a hard thing to sit with.”

“I know it is.”