Chapter 2 THE STICK I COULDN'T HOLD

Truett's POV

My stick hit the ice before my brain caught up with what my eyes were seeing.

"Sorensen! Pick it up! We're not done!" Coach Okonkwo's whistle cut through the air, sharp and annoyed, but I couldn't move. My gloves were still open where the stick had slipped out of them, and my whole body felt like it had been dunked in ice water.

She was standing at the boards. Marlow Winters. Three years older than the last time I saw her, but I would have known her anywhere, in any building, in any lifetime.

"Sorensen!" Coach was skating toward me now, and the rest of the guys had slowed down, watching, because I never dropped my stick. Not once. Not in four years on this team.

I bent down and grabbed it off the ice like nothing happened. "Sorry, Coach. Lost my grip."

He didn't buy it. Coach Okonkwo had been coaching me since I was fourteen years old. He knew the difference between a bad grip and a boy who'd just seen something that knocked the air clean out of him. But he didn't push it, not with the whole team watching, not with practice still running. He just blew the whistle again and said, "Line change. Move."

I skated to the bench on legs that didn't feel like mine.

Ten minutes earlier, before any of this happened, Coach had pulled me aside during warm-ups and said, "New reporter's starting today. She's covering you specifically, all season. Big feature piece, sponsors are excited about it." He'd checked his clipboard and said her name, Marlow Winters, and I remember thinking, there's no way, there's a hundred girls with that name, it's not her, it can't be her.

I had actually laughed it off in my head. That's how sure I was that the universe wasn't cruel enough to do this to me twice.

The universe was that cruel.

I sat on the bench with my helmet still on so nobody could see my face, and I made myself breathe normally, in and out, the way I used to before big games when my chest got tight, and my head got loud. It didn't work as well as it used to. Nothing about my body was listening to me right now.

Marcus dropped down next to me on the bench, breathing hard from his shift. "You good, man? You looked like you saw a ghost out there."

"I'm fine," I said, which was the second lie I'd told in five minutes.

I wasn't fine. I was sitting fifty feet away from the one person on earth I never planned on seeing again, the one person whose name I hadn't said out loud in three years because saying it made the leaving feel real all over again. And she was here. Not by accident. She was assigned to me. For six weeks. Every practice. Every game. Every single day until the championship was decided.

I glanced toward the boards again. I couldn't help it. She was talking to Bettina now, nodding, holding a recorder like her hands weren't shaking, except I could see from here that they were. She always did that when she was nervous, that little tremor she thought nobody noticed. I noticed. I noticed everything about her three years ago, and apparently my body hadn't gotten the memo that I wasn't allowed to notice anymore.

My phone buzzed in my bag under the bench. I wasn't supposed to check it during practice, but something made me reach for it anyway, some feeling in my gut that said this wasn't going to wait.

It was my dad.

Dad: Big call today from the Merriton Sports Group. They want to finalize the sponsorship after the season IF the coverage stays clean. No distractions. No stories that make you look anything but focused. This is the money that keeps us in this house, Truett. You understand what I'm asking.

I stared at the screen until the words stopped making sense as words and just became shapes.

No distractions.

I looked up, and across the ice, Marlow laughed at something Bettina said, a real laugh, the kind that used to be mine to cause. The kind I used to build entire days around, trying to earn one more of them out of her.

I shoved the phone back in my bag as it had burned me.

There was no version of this where I got to have both things. My dad had lost his job two years ago, and the only reason we still had our house, the only reason my little sister still went to the school she loved, was because I skated well enough and stayed clean enough that a sponsor wanted to attach their name to mine. One bad headline. One story that made me look like anything other than a machine built to win, and that money disappeared. And it wasn't just my future on the line. It was my whole family's.

And now the person assigned to write my story for the next six weeks, the person who was going to be standing three feet away from me every single day, was the one person alive who could make me forget every rule I'd built to protect what was left of us.

Coach called my line back onto the ice. I skated out on autopilot, running drills I could have run in my sleep, my eyes betraying me every thirty seconds by drifting back to the boards.

She caught me looking the third time.

She didn't look away.

Neither did I.

And that's when Bettina turned, checked something on her clipboard, and called out loud enough for half the rink to hear: "Truett! First interview's moved up. She's ready for you now."

My stomach dropped straight through the ice.

I had exactly the length of one lap left to figure out how I was supposed to sit across from Marlow Winters, look her in the eye, and pretend I didn't remember every single reason I used to think I'd love her for the rest of my life.

I didn't have an answer.

And when I finally skated off the ice toward her, close enough now to see her face clearly for the first time in three years, I realized something that made my chest go tight all over again.

She wasn't looking at me like a stranger.

She was looking at me like she already knew exactly why I left.