Page 32 of Home Ice Advantage

Ryan exhaled. He had always told Murph everything. It felt strange and wrong to keep a secret from him, especially a secret this huge and life-changing. But it was still so uncertain and new and dangerous, it didn’t feel right to tell anyone, even Murph. It wasn’t just his secret, it was Aronson’s, too. There was a lot on the line. He trusted Murph with his life, but he just—couldn’t say it. Not yet. But he had to say something; the silence was stretching out, uncomfortable and pulled tight like an aging rubber band.

“It’s been weird,” he said, finally. “You know. Shannon dumping me like that. I’m going to get my shit tomorrow, whatever she hasn’t thrown out already.”

Murphy exhaled, too. Ryan could tell that Murph didn’t believe him, but he trusted Ryan’s judgment enough not to push. “Y’all should’ve stayed in Dallas.”

“Of course you still blame all of this on moving to New Hampshire,” Ryan said, so fond it ached.

“Was I right, though, or was I right?”

“Probably. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to talk to her again outside of a courtroom, but I think that probably uh... Dallas wouldn’t have helped.”

“Probably not,” Murph admitted. “Still. Wish you guys had lived down here. It’d be good to see you again.”

“You and Tara are welcome to visit anytime you want. I’ll get you tickets. Although you’ll probably want to stay in a hotel. I, uh. Well, right now my apartment’s just an air mattress.”

“Jesus, that’s the most divorced-guy thing I think you’ve ever said. What are you eating, ramen packets?”

“I can cook,” Ryan said, stung. “And besides, we still have catered meals after games at the rink.”

Murph’s booming laugh cheered him up immeasurably. He could almost picture the way Murph would’ve brushed his hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes. “Well, we’ll have to take you up on it, one of these days. Once you get a little more settled. Maybe we’ll bring the kids. They’d love to see Uncle Ryan again.”

“Yeah, sure,” Ryan said. “Let me know in advance, we can bring them to a morning skate, too. I’m sure the boys would humor them.”

“You’re the best,” Murph said. He had the kind of vehement sincerity that would have embarrassed Ryan, if it had come from anyone else. But that was Murph. They’d grown up together. He felt the same way.

They chatted a little bit about what they had been up to as well, and Ryan realized, belatedly, that despite his best intentions, he had probably been talking too often about Aronson. About Aronson as a person, not just a coworker. It was an uncomfortable thought, particularly because Murph usually noticed those things. “Okay, I gotta get back to it. Are you satisfied I’m not withering away into dust,Mom?”

“There’s still something weird going on and I’m gonna get to the bottom of it. But for now, yeah.”

Ryan hung up before he could say anything else that might give him away.

In a way, he was glad that they had the next few days off. Things with Aronson had been understandably fucking weird. They’d gotten through the practice without incident, but Ryan was aware he hadn’t been up to his own usual standards. He’d been awkward and distracted, too self-aware of where he was skating, mostly talking with Petey and Heidi.

“The face-offs,” Heidi said, skating up to him, “aregrim.”

“You want me to see if I can get Conroy to hire a face-off coach?” Ryan said, only half joking. Andy Chernoff, the Beacons’ owner, had deep pockets, and Conroy had indicated to Ryan that as long as it was a reasonable request in service of player development, he would entertain it.

“I can work with them,” she said, rolling her shoulders, “but it’s going to be a seasons-long assignment, at this point. We’re seeing some improvement working on the drills in a game-like simulation, but... Williams gets beat clean, a lot.”

“What do you think the issue is?”

“Could be experience. Could be—he’s got to learn how to use his size a little more forcefully. It’s not a problem on the ice. Just getting the timing right in the dot.”

Heidi was a machine when it came to face-offs: you could drop a puck in front of her and no matter how you tried to angle it, she was almost always able to sweep it back clean. She had a way of positioning her knee just right, so that a linesman wouldn’t kick her out. But the way she balanced allowed her to get a head start muscling into the circle. Ryan had always been happy he hadn’t had to worry about them in a game simulation, although he’d taken many against Murph when they were just fucking around at practice. Murph had always enjoyed shoving him down on the ice.

The face-off talk was a good distraction, but he was still aware of Aronson, where he was off working with the power-play unit. It didn’t help that Aronson kept watching him without doing it obviously, from the corner of his eye. Every time Ryan caught him at it, he could feel his whole skin prickle, like the rink had suddenly dropped another twenty degrees. It was ridiculous, and Ryan had never been so happy to get the hell out of the rink before.

I-95 was a nightmare usually, but it felt even worse when he was kind of dreading the destination. It also felt worse driving an insanely cumbersome truck. There wasn’t any reason to suspect that Shannon would be waiting there when he got home, but the part of him that was able to anticipate plays on the ice felt off anyway, the hair prickling at the back of his neck. On the ice it had always meant a goal coming. Now, it just spelled impending disaster.

He’d lucked out, though, because the U-Haul had Bluetooth. It was a little childish, but he scrolled through his saved albums and put onNevermind, an album that he’d loved so much as an angsty teenager that he’d worn out several tape versions of it. With the windows rolled down to the chilly November air and the familiar riffs of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” blaring from the speakers, he felt like he could finally exhale, at least a little.

The feeling didn’t last long. It slipped away faster and faster the closer he got to Newfields. Then it was like the walls closed in again, the familiar tightening in his chest of going back to a home that had never really felt like home. It was funny, the way he felt like that in Boston and at the house he’d owned with his ex for so many years. He wondered, briefly, whether he’d ever have a place that felt comfortable to return to. Someplacehis.

The house looked exactly the same as he’d left it. Either Shannon was mowing the lawn, or she had hired someone to keep up with the upkeep; it looked as immaculate as ever. She had put in new window boxes with professionally designed plant arrangements, a riot of red leaves and knobby sticks and whimsical shapes. Ryan had never seen the point of anything like that—half of the arrangement wasn’t even planted in the box; it was just shoved in there with stakes. He’d never saidnoto them—he had made enough money over the course of his career that he rarely said no to anything Shannon wanted—but once he’d offered his opinion, Shannon had never asked again.

He parked the van in the driveway and thought he’d have to ask Shannon to hold on to some of his workshop equipment a little longer. That would require a house of his own, and he had no idea when that would be possible or even really feasible. Right now, even furnishing a two-bedroom apartment seemed almost insurmountable.

Shannon opened the front door and Ryan almost tripped over his own two feet, right there in the driveway.

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