Page 33 of Home Ice Advantage

It was the first time he’d seen her in person since the morning of his birthday, and he was almost relieved that he still found her incredibly attractive—so he definitely wasn’t 100% gay. Her face had more stress lines than it had had when they’d met, but she was still a beautiful woman—a few inches taller than he was, with curly black hair she usually wore swept up in a bun. She had really striking light blue eyes that looked right through you and she’d always dressed in a way that really accentuated her face and her body.

“Hello, Ryan.” She couldn’t quite meet him in the eye.

“Hi...uh, you know, I wasn’t expecting you to...well, be here at all, really.”

“I know. I was thinking about it, though, and it’s been a while since we were able to actually talk, and I didn’t know if you were going to bring anyone to help you pack.”

“Murph’s still in Dallas. And you know I wasn’t going to ask any of my brothers.”

“Yes.” She took a deep breath, one that visibly moved her shoulders up, and exhaled, long and slow. “Look—do you want to come in? We can have lunch, and then we can start packing.”

Ryan didn’t know how he felt right in that moment. He’d never felt the betrayal that he thought he’d have felt when she ended things. He didn’t resent her. He felt wary, unsure of what was coming next, but not any of the things you probably should’ve felt in a situation like this. “Yeah, okay.”

It was even weirder going back into the house. It still had the same smell that he associated with being home, but it didn’t feel like home anymore. Shannon had already done a few things to change it up: she’d taken down the small amount of hockey memorabilia she’d permitted upstairs; she’d hung up a few new pieces of art. There were a few amateurish ceramic bowls and sculptures on display on the coffee table. She’d been burning an unfamiliar candle, on top of the familiar smell of the house layered a fir and pine winter scent.

In the kitchen, Shannon had already set up lunch. She’d made something she used to make for him all of the time during his playing days: poached chicken salads with quinoa and chickpeas and a thick, herby yogurt dressing. The same way she always had, there was a little pitcher of ice water with slices of lemon and lime in it, some of the herbs left over from the salad muddled in the bottom. It was all so familiar that he felt a brief pang of missing her, missingthis, before he remembered what he was there to do.

“Ryan—” she started, right at the same time that he said, “Shannon.”

“You go first,” she said, after a second.

“Look, Shan, I just wanted to—I don’t know. I wanted to let you know I don’t have any hard feelings about the way things ended. And that I’m sorry I fucked things up so bad. I knew you wanted a life without hockey, but I’m just not ready to give it up. Ican’tgive it up. And that’s not fair to you. And it wasn’t fair to expect you to be okay with it. I just—I love you, but I did a really shitty job of showing that, especially these last few years.”

Shannon stood for a minute with her arms crossed over her chest, like she was hugging herself. She laughed, short and a little sour. “I thought a lot about getting an apology like that from you over the years. It’s weird that I’m getting it now and I’m still mostly just relieved that we’re done. Is that weird?”

“No,” Ryan said, and he was surprised to find that it was true.

She took a step forward and picked up the plates, setting them out on the table. “Jesus, Ry. We got marriedsoyoung, you know?”

“Yeah, I do, I was there,” he said dryly, and she laughed again, more genuine this time. “Maybe we should’ve waited. Maybe you would’ve realized that you didn’t actually want to marry a hockey player after all. Do you regret it?”

“Sometimes,” Shannon said, slowly. As she spoke, she spooned out the salad on the plates, poured him some water. “Sometimes I think I could’ve had more years doing things I loved without fighting with you about hockey all of the time. But maybe I wouldn’t appreciate where we are now as much as I do without that.”

“Look at you, getting philosophical on me. You know I’m just a hockey player, right?”

“Stop,” she said sharply. “You might be a hockey player, Ryan, and you might be a fucking idiot when it comes to anything involving emotional intelligence, but you’re notstupid. You’re probably one of the smartest people I know. That’s what made this so frustrating over the years.”

Ryan stared at her. “Shannon, seriously?”

“I’m being serious, Ryan. I don’t know anyone who studies that damngameas seriously as you do. I don’t know anyone who’d be up at all hours of the night reading about neuroplasticity or fucking Sun Tzu. I think part of this whole problem is just you didn’t—I don’t think you know what you would have been capable ofwithouthockey. And you never wanted to, I get it. That’s fine. But it’s just—it makes me so sad, sometimes, thinking about what we could have had.”

Ryan thought about it, too. He knew Shannon had wanted kids, at one point, but it had never worked out. He knew Shannon had wanted to get more involved in art education: he’d encouraged her to take classes, but he didn’t have the vocabulary or the time to talk to her about it at home. Somewhere, in some parallel universe, there were a Ryan and Shannon sitting in this same house, while the kids were running around upstairs screaming, talking about a new class she was directing or—but it wasn’t a parallel universe. It was this one. Here he and Shannon were, in their forties, looking down the barrel of a no-fault divorce.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “And I do mean that.”

“It’s okay...and maybe it’s weird to say, but I do mean that, too. It might have taken us a hell of a lot to get here, but I’m not... I was angry when I first kicked you out. But I’ve been working with someone on this and I’m learning to, like...let it go. You know?”

Ryan last year would have made a joke like,Sure, Elsa. Ryan this year said, “I’m really proud of you, Shan,” and meant it.

Shannon swallowed and looked away, busying herself with pushing him a plate. “Yeah, well. We’ve both grown up a little, at least.”

They ate the lunch without talking about heavy topics, just logistics about Ryan’s workshop and some of the things he would need to leave by necessity. It was like a weight was lifted off his shoulders, knowing things weren’t as fraught, knowing he no longer had to worry about her dumping his shit on the curb for the trash men or giving it away. She helped him pack some of the more portable stuff: his clothes shoved in trash bags, his memorabilia wrapped up in newspaper, his books stacked in plastic bins she’d bought for him. It wasn’t easy work, with just the two of them: a lot of trips out into the cold, with Ryan’s arms stretched as wide as they could to hold the bins.

When they were finally finished, a few hours later, they paused at the doorway. Shannon looked at him with the kind of expression he might have been able to decipher, once, but couldn’t now. She looked sad and relieved and longing all at the same time, and she held out her arms to him. The embrace was familiar and not familiar as well: her hair smelled the same as it always had; her body felt the same in his arms, the way they couldn’t quite see eye to eye, no matter how he arranged himself. She hugged him tightly, so hard he could feel his ribs creak under the force of it.

It felt final. It felt like the goodbye he hadn’t been able to get from her, the day she’d kicked him out.

“I’m glad we did this,” she said, as she released him.

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