Page 41 of The Rebound Plan

He’s gone still, all of his muscles tense.

Slowly, he turns his head just enough to glance sideways at me.

I smile encouragingly.It’s okay.I know all about soothing the frustrated beast inside a hockey player.

“I have to give up the idea of something, something I want very much.” His gaze is careful, barely looking my way, but I feel his words in my chest. They’re loaded with frustration. “And it’s proving harder than I thought.”

“But if you give it up, it will free your energy to focus on this upcoming season?”

Without hesitating, he nods. “Aye.”

My heart squeezes for him. I try to think about what I know of this man. Not as much as I wish I did to give him the best guidance here. But at the end of the day, all hockey players are the same. Nothing else is as important as the ultimate prize. “You won’t regret giving the team everything you have.”

He doesn’t look convinced.

I shift my hand over so I can bump my fingers against his. When I touch him, he takes a big, deep breath.

“I know it’s a hard position to be in,” I say. “Are you thinking about thewhat ifsof the road not taken, maybe?”

His shoulders relax, and he nods again.

“Well, I’ve done it, and I can tell you that once I made the decision, I only felt relief. So one way to test yourself is to make the hard break, and see how it feels.”

He shifts to give me his full attention. “You’ve done what?”

“I’ve given up something I wanted—or what I thought I wanted—in order to get something else that I needed.” I hesitate. I never talk about the choice to trade my Single Girl Life for Married Life. Some of the details feel too raw, still, after all these years. And it feels like betraying Max to tell anyone that I had to change myself to seal the deal on getting married.

“What did you give up?”

I shake my head. “Doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does.”

I take a deep breath. “Actually, I think my whole life has been a cycle of giving up one version of myself to discover a new one. And all that matters is that I’ve never regretted it.”

Russ makes a thoughtful sound, then looks back out across the lake. “Was Tilman what you needed?”

All the air in my lungs punches out of me.

He snaps his gaze back to my face. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.” I whisper. “And yes. He was.”

His finger nudges mine, in the same way I’d poked at him. “What was the previous version of yourself before him, then?”

“A party girl whose career never got off the ground. And that career had an expiration date, anyway.” I say it as lightly as possible, but I can feel the rest of the truth barrelling in fast and furious behind those words. “But she also had an incredibly wild social life. It was an intenselymeperiod, where I got to fly my freak flag as high as I wanted.”

It’s bittersweet now to admit that I gave up my entire identity for the safety and security of being Max’s wife, when I’m on the cusp of what feels like another turning point where I’ll give up that reward that I sacrificed so much for in the first place.

And I’m so focused on that feeling that I don’t even realize I just told one of Max’s teammates that I miss being freaky.

Damn it.

I tense.

“Hey, don’t worry,” Russ says. “That’s just between us. It…helps, really.”

I exhale in relief. “Thank you. And I’m glad to hear that. Because if you don’t give it absolutely everything, I really think you’ll always wonder what could have been. Just focus on what you need right now. Don’t worry about what you wanted in the past.”

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