Page 187 of Across His Line

That terrifies me more than my grandma’s house ever could.

28

I Hope So

Rafe

I put Palinski into the snowbank hard enough that he comes up out of it laughing with snow down the back of his collar.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks.

Nothing is wrong with me. I skate back up the ice. I take the puck off his brother. I take it off the kid in the camo jacket twice, and the second time I put my shoulder into him a lot harder than you’re supposed to in a game with no refs on somebody’s lake. He goes down on his ass.

“Jesus, Waleska.”

I help him up. I don’t say sorry. I go back to the other end and wait for the puck to come back around.

It’s twelve degrees, and I’m sweating through my hoodie. I’ve been out here two hours, and I can’t get tired. Every time I stop moving, it comes back up, the thing I’ve been skating away from since I pulled out of the drive this morning, and I have to go find the puck again.

Tessa didn’t come with me today. She was at the kitchen table at nine with my mom in a sweater with the sleeves pushed up. The two books were open alongside her notebook. She was drinking coffee and busy with her pen moving.

I asked if she wanted to come out to the lake. She looked up and said she was going to stay; if that was okay, she wanted to finish the chapter on pricing, and my mom was going to show her something on her laptop.

I said fine. It was fine. It is fine. She doesn’t have to come watch a bunch of guys from high school knock each other into snowbanks. She was doing something she wanted to do with a woman who’s apparently decided to adopt her. That’s good. That’s what I wanted for her.

And every time I come around the far end of the ice, my eyes go to the fire, to the folding chair with the blanket on it where it’s empty.

“Where’s Canten?” Palinski says, at the water cooler in between games. He’s still got snow in his hair.

“Home.”

“Thought she’d come back.”

“She didn’t.”

He shrugs, drinks, wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “Too bad. Emma was asking about her.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t like that he noticed. I don’t like that anybody noticed. I didn’t like it the first time, either.

I leave at two. Palinski yells something after me about the twenty-sixth, and I lift a hand and don’t turn around.

The house is warm when I come in through the mudroom, warm enough that I can feel it on my face, where the cold is still sitting. My hair’s wet with sweat and stuck to my forehead under my hat, so I shake it out. My hoodie is sticking to my back. My legs are humming. I didn’t burn any of it off. I tried for two hours, and it’s all still in there, fizzing, with nowhere to go.

I hear her before I see her.

She’s in the kitchen with my mom, talking fast. Her voice going up at the ends of sentences the way it did on my couch, the way it does when she’s excited about something.

“—because if I do it that way, the time isn’t the cap anymore, the cap is just how many people I can—”

And the thing that’s been in my chest all day turns. It doesn’t go anywhere. It just turns around and points the other direction.

I take my boots off in the mudroom. I put my skates on the bench. I go through the kitchen.

She’s sitting on the counter. Actually sitting on it with her legs hanging down in the same sweater with a pen in her hand and her hair half falling out of a bun. My mom’s at the island with her reading glasses on, slicing an apple. There are papers everywhere. Her notebook is open on the counter next to her knee.

She sees me.

“Rafe,” she says.