Page 62 of Fake Skating

I almost couldn’t watch the game.

Seeing the guys get introduced, watching the fans going crazy, witnessing the place erupt in chants of “Mr. Hockey” when Alec was announced (because, according to my grandpa, he was the favorite to win the award)—everything inside me wanted to be at the sold-out X so badly.

But I was with Grandpa Mick, instead, watching from a distance.

After the panic attack yesterday, I cried like a blubbering baby as I told him about the postcards, the fake dating, the real dating, and then I told him the truth about why I really broke up with Alec (after swearing him to secrecy).

I’d needed to tell someone , and, as odd as it sounded, I trusted my grandpa more than almost anyone else.

I expected him to call Benji a little shit or something, but he’d just handed me a box of tissues and told me to blow.

Then he shocked me by saying I didn’t have to go to school on game day because I was going with him to Tom Reid’s Pub downtown to watch tournament games all day. We showed up at the hockey pub before lunch, and we’d been sitting there ever since.

It’d been kind of fun, watching games with Grandpa and learning hockey until Southview’s game started at seven. I was so nervous for Alec and so sad I wasn’t there that I couldn’t even sit; I had to pace around our table, cracking my knuckles and wringing my hands.

And the game was insane from the second the puck dropped.

Richie scored a goal ninety seconds in, a lucky empty netter that had Grandpa Mick and me yelling and high-fiving everyone around us.

Alec played like he always did, somehow managing to be everywhere and everything all at once, doing an amazing job protecting the goalie.

He looked faster than usual, if that was even possible, slamming players into the boards while doggedly going after the puck.

I could barely breathe as I watched.

But in the second period, when Kyle tripped Benji and got sent to the penalty box for two minutes, St. John’s took advantage of the power play and managed to score not only once, but twice .

“No!” I yelled when the second one went in, dragging my hands through my hair and kind of wanting to vomit.

“Cool it,” my grandpa said, signaling to the server that he needed another beer. “Plenty of time.”

The buzzer sounded, and I wasn’t sure I was going to survive another period of this.

My phone vibrated in my pocket—and, God, it was my dad.

Talk about terrible timing.

And somehow my grandpa knew who it was, because when I glanced at him, he said, “Just answer—you need to talk to him, and you’re just going to pace through intermission anyway.”

“True,” I said, feeling somehow more capable of talking to my dad with Grandpa Mick’s support.

“Hey, Dad,” I said, standing and walking over to the hallway by the restrooms. The pub was packed and noisy, so I was looking for somewhere marginally quieter.

“Hey, honey. Where are you? It’s so noisy,” he said.

“Why did you leave?” I asked, because hearing his voice hurt something inside me. And it make me feel bold. Bolder than before. I deserved answers. “I mean, how could you leave without talking to me first?”

“Oh,” he said, sounding surprised that I’d jumped right into it. I’m a little surprised myself. “Well, it just seemed like we weren’t going to have a fruitful conversation with—”

“?‘Fruitful conversation’?” I repeated, immediately frustrated. “Did you really think that asking me to pick a parent would result in a fruitful conversation?”

“I wasn’t asking you to do that,” he snapped, sounding defensive. “I was simply trying to get closer—”

“But I overheard what Grandpa Mick said to you,” I said, steeling myself for his reaction. “And he wasn’t wrong. Why couldn’t you have wanted to get closer to me without asking me to destroy Mom?”

“Now, come on, that’s not what I was doing,” he said.

“It was, though,” I said, wondering if he really even cared. “You know Mom, and you know how close Mom and I are, so you can’t just pretend it didn’t occur to you that this would be upsetting.”

It was scary, being this honest with him, but I didn’t want to stop.

“I know we let you down by moving back, and I’m so sorry for that,” I said. “But I’m kind of happy here, I think, being in a place that feels permanent for once. I don’t want that to hurt you, and I don’t want it to make you distance yourself, because I love you.”

I took a deep breath, feeling slightly braver than normal.

“Daniella,” he said, his voice quiet, and then he sighed. Said, “I’m sorry too.”

“You are?”

“I am,” he said, sounding… more introspective than usual. “I did feel like I was losing you when you guys moved back there, and I’m not proud of my knee-jerk reaction. Your grandpa said some things the other night that really hit home.”

“Oh,” I said, my chest feeling tight as my dad completely surprised me.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years when it comes to you, but it was always because I love you—you know that, right?”

“Of course,” I said, absolutely confused by the fact that he was admitting to being wrong.

I guess Grandpa really had struck a chord with him.

“Wow, what is that ?” he asked when a random guy walking to the bathroom yelled something as he walked by.

I explained we were watching the tournament game, and he said, “Yeah, were you as shocked as I was to discover Sarah’s kid turned into an athlete?”

Sarah’s kid. I could tell my dad was trying, so I wasn’t going to focus on the fact that he couldn’t seem to remember the name of the kid who was all I could talk about for the first, like, twelve years of my life. “For sure,” I agreed.

“I had him pegged all wrong. I thought he was kind of a creepy little dork before that, honestly.”

“You did?”

“Well, between the way he always followed you around and all the postcards written in another language, who could blame me?”

The postcards. “It wasn’t another language, Dad; it was a code we made up.”

“Same difference,” he said. “All I know is that the guy kept sending them when he was way too old for that, so it seemed like a red flag. What well-adjusted boy in high schoolis still sending coded messages once a week to a girl he knew in grade school?”

“He stopped sending them when I was in middle school, to be fair,” I said, remembering exactly when he stopped writing, because it was right when everything in my life was at its worst.

“No,” he said. “I distinctly remember telling your mother that it was weird that the kid was going into high school and still doing it.”

“I don’t think that’s right, but—”

“No, it is, Daniella—I started tossing them,” he said. “ That’s why you don’t remember them, because I chucked them with the junk mail.”

“Wait.” All the sounds around me disappeared as I asked, “You threw them away?”

He threw. Postcards. Away…?

“I mean, as a parent, it’s a little concerning when there’s a kid who won’t stop sending your daughter messages you can’t even decipher—”

“I can’t believe this,” I said, my thoughts racing back to the things Alec had said when I broke up with him, the things that had seemed to make zero sense. I wrote you every fucking week. “So… he was still sending them?”

“All the time,” he said. “Letters, too. And you were struggling to adjust after what had happened in Texas, so it just seemed better to cut that off.”

Letters??

“Oh my God,” I said in disbelief, the world stopping as the truth of everything hit me. “You threw away his postcards.”

Alec had never ghosted me.

“You threw them away,” I repeated, totally in shock.

He had kept writing.

Which meant that he hadn’t changed at all.

I closed my eyes, because this also meant that when I stopped writing, brokenhearted by his abandonment, I was actually ghosting him .

Abandoning him .

Oh no.

At least this time there aren’t any letters for you to ignore.

Now it made sense, the way he’d seemed mad at me from the minute I showed up in Southview.

How could you walk away when I needed you?

He thought I’d ghosted him.

“How could you do that?” I asked, my voice cracking. “How could you just throw them away?”

“Honey,” he said, and I could tell by his tone that he was shocked it was a big deal. “I didn’t think those little messages meant anything to you.”

They actually meant everything.

“I—I have to go,” I said, needing to get off the phone and figure out what this meant. Just when I thought my dad and I were moving forward, we were moving two steps back. It was soul-crushing. “We aren’t done with this, but I have to hang up now.”

“I love you, kiddo,” he said, which somehow made it worse and better, all at the same time. “I’m sorry.”

“You too. Bye.”

I hung up, shaken by the revelation as I left the hallway and went back into the pub. I pushed through the crowded bar, numb, because this changed everything.

But when I got to the table, my grandpa looked over at me with a weird expression.

One I hadn’t seen before.

“What?” I asked, glancing up at the big TV.

I expected to see that St. John’s Academy had scored again or something, but it looked like the game had stopped.

And then I saw why.

A player was down.

A player wearing the number-seven jersey.

Alec.

My entire body went cold as I saw him lying on the ice, surrounded by his teammates as a stretcher came out.

“Oh my God, what happened?” I asked, unable to look away from the big screen, my heart in my throat.

As if on cue, the TV switched to an instant replay.

It showed Alec going after the puck, his back to the camera, and then he was checked from behind, a blue jersey slamming into him at full speed. Worthington. I watched in horror as Alec flew into the boards, headfirst, then went down on the ice.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

“Grab your coat,” Grandpa Mick said, getting out of his chair. “We gotta go.”

“What?” I couldn’t look away from the screen, paralyzed. “Where?”

He gestured to the guy behind the bar that he wanted to settle his tab and said, “We’re going to the hospital.”