Page 33

Chapter 33

Nat

Syd isn’t at home. Of course she’s not; she’s off with my estranged brother, which means she’s at our late father’s house. Because for some reason I cannot fathom, Jess still owns it.

I pace a lap across the kitchen of my townhouse.

Torn.

What do I do? Let this go? Wait for her to come home? But she’s with Jesse . At Dad’s house. Talking Ice Out shit, which Jess is too removed from Day River to begin to understand.

Syd’s just a seventeen-year-old kid, excited about a new opportunity—she doesn’t understand it any more than he does.

No, I need to go to Dad’s old house. To a place I haven’t been in fourteen years, a place riddled with dark memories and lurking skeletons I buried long ago.

But in the end, the choice is clear. Syd’s at Dad’s house. So that’s where I need to be.

I crank the music in the Lexus as I merge onto the highway.

The house where Jess and I grew up lurks on the south side of town, in a quiet, slightly run-down neighborhood. Was a good place to grow up, lots of kids and lots of ponds. Like growing up with a hockey team.

I’d probably never have learned to skate otherwise .

Hell, I fucking loved it. Because it meant hockey any time. Weekends, after school, sometimes before it. We’d be at the pond, skates on our feet and sticks in hand. Ice in our hearts and hockey in our blood.

Was the only time I really felt whole. Alive. Seen. Like my life was going somewhere.

Driving through the old neighborhood now, not much has changed. That dry cleaner still sits on the corner, next to the nail salon and the Chinese restaurant. There’s the old hardware store, the local grocery. Gas station. McDonald’s. Then the houses: older, quiet, a little worn and rough around the edges.

It feels the same. It feels so different.

It’s not the place that’s changed, I realize. It’s me. I’m not the same kid I was the last time I came here. And I don’t know what to make of that.

Don’t know what to think or how to feel when I turn onto our old street. The houses are the same , the fucking same, and it’s like stepping into an old life. One I wanted so desperately to leave behind forever.

And there it is. At the end of the street, slightly on the left. Behind a sagging oak tree.

The old blue Victorian.

The house I grew up in. The house where, once upon a time, I had a mother and a father, a brother, a future. Dreams.

The house where all those, one by one, let me down. Broke. Left me. And I learned how to live without them. Each and every one.

Once, I called this place home.

Before I started repoing and Brenda opened her own salon and we finally got Syd out of there. Of course, a year after we moved out, Dad drunkenly wrapped his old Ford Ranger around a tree and Jesse inherited the house—but he never offered either of us a place to stay.

And yet, here I am. Back.

For Syd—the same reason I left. Because Dad without Jesse around, Dad with a new baby in the house, Dad with his broken hockey stardom and his alcohol habits, was a nightmare I couldn’t escape .

Until all of asudden, he was gone . In a way I didn’t know how to process.

I pull the car into the gravel driveway.

Park.

My boots crunch on the rock as I climb the slight incline to the door. I hesitate, uncertain whether I should knock or simply let myself in.

Fuck it.

I walk in.

A wave of stale, musty air hits me as I step into the small but mostly vacant living room. Nobody’s lived here since Brenda and I moved out, and it feels . . . empty. Soulless. No decor or rugs, no photos. Just two couches, a table between them, and an armchair. Empty, a void, like the hole in my chest.

I’ve no idea why Jess never sold the place.

“Nattie!” Jesse lounges in the corner of the couch against the far wall. His signature grin unfurls across his face, and I wonder what he sees. Does he even recognize me, after all the years he’s missed?

“Jess.” I let the door clack closed behind me.

God, he looks so much like the young Jesse I once admired—nay, adored. The one I tried so hard to emulate: that grin, the way he talked and walked, his clothes, his fancy colognes. Everything about him was the epitome of cool, and not just because Jess was the guy who got the girls, who everyone loved, the guy who was going places.

I adored him because he was my brother .

Because, once upon a long time ago, he saw the forgotten kid that nobody else saw, and said, hey, you wanna learn guitar?

Because it was him, not Dad, who taught me how to hold a hockey stick, how to skate, the proper order to put on pads.

My chest aches at the memories.

“Come to join the talk?” Jess leans forward, drawing my attention from the past—to Syd, perched on the armchair in the corner.

“I’m not here for you.” My words slip through my teeth in an icy spill as my gaze refocuses on Syd. My daughter. The one I’ve worked for—to get out of this house, away from this depressing, dead-end life—every single fucking day for the past seventeen years.

“Syd.” My voice is a croak. She looks so wrong, perched on that familiar chair in this old familiar room. I turn back to Jess. “Why is my daughter here?”

“We’ve got so many good ideas for the tourney.” Jess stands, and before I realize what’s happening, he’s right beside me. Like we never stopped being brothers. Like he never walked out, left me and Brenda to the wrath of Rey Taylor. Turned his back on this whole damned town.

I step back to put space between us.

“I don’t care.” My heart beats too fast, almost akin to panic. “I want to know why the fuck my daughter is here.”

“She’s helping me.” Jess is still smiling, that same charming, easygoing smile I’ve known all my life. “And I’m helping her—”

“No.” Sudden emotion floods me, leaves me shaky, almost dizzy, but I don’t know what it is. Anger? Fear? “No. You don’t get to be absent her whole life and then, when you want to be the center of the show, pop back in.”

Jess flinches, and the grin vanishes. “It’s not like—”

“No, Jess.” The emotion lists towards anger, my vision tunneling around him. “You had no right to bring her here.”

“Dad.” Syd stands, drawing my gaze, widening that tunnel. “We were just talking—”

“We’re going.” I turn from Syd to Jess. “You want to see her, you talk to me first. That’s not negotiable.”

“Nat, wait .” The pleading in Jess’s voice stops me because I hear young Jesse in that tone, the Jesse who was my brother, who cared. “I’m just trying to help—”

“No.” My hand reaches out of its own accord, my fingers feathering over Syd’s shoulder blade. “Please, Syd.”

She must hear the desperation in my voice. The begging. The ragged edge that says how close I am to breaking.

She shifts to stand at my side, so together, we turn for the door .

“Hope I’ll see you there, Sydney,” Jess says as my fingers curve around the knob. “You and Avery.”

My body goes cold. Cold tingles down my spine and in my fingers and toes. And it’s not anger, not rage. Not even dread.

It’s fear.

“Where, Jess?” I ask. I curl my arm around Syd’s shoulders, like maybe that can protect her from the world. “See her where?”

“Nowhere,” says Syd, at the same time as Jess says, “The Ice Out.”

The fear widens into a dark, cold pool.

“No way. No fucking way. Are you fucking insane?” I let go of Syd to round on Jess. Jess is my size, my musculature, but I haven’t taken shit from anyone in a long time. “You want to invite high school kids to the fucking Ice Out ?”

His brows lift in confusion, and I realize—

“Shit. You really don’t have a clue, do you?” I can only stare at the man who’s become a stranger. An outsider. “You’ve been away from this town for too long, brother.”

I turn, nudge Sydney in front of me towards the door.

A warm, heavy hand lands on my shoulder, the gentle tug telling me to stop. But it’s the words that freeze me. “She’s my niece—”

The anger comes on me so suddenly, it’s like crashing into a red wall of rage.

“No, she’s not!” The words crack out across the room as I spin, throwing off his hand. Vision tunneling all over again. “Seventeen years, and what, suddenly you want to be family?”

Jesse flinches, his face slack with shock, like I slapped him. “Nat—”

“You never called.” The words tear from my throat in a snarl. Red tints the edges of my vision. “Never visited. Never sent her a fucking birthday card. I never expected you to offer us a place to stay, but to not care at all?”

My hands clench hard into fists because I’m done with this, with him, with trying to be the good guy, the better man. I’m not better. Never have been, never will be .

Jess stares, his face a mess of slackened lines. “Nat, I’m not—”

“You’re a selfish prick is what you are,” I snarl, my jaw clenched so tight I barely grit the words out through my teeth. “You ignore everything in Day River for seventeen years. And then what, it starts making the news and you waltz back in here to steal the spotlight again? To show everybody else how much better you are? Is that why you’re here? So you can dominate this tournament?”

“Fuck you.” Jess’s face is hard, sharp lines. “You never knew how good you had it.”

“How good I had it—” I surge forward one step, fists lifted, because I am gonna hit him, like I’ve wanted to for seventeen years. Who’s got the scars, the scabs, the bruises on his knuckles? Who skates the Ice Out once a week? Who, truly, has ice in his veins and cold in his blood?

But another hand on my shoulder stops me.

“Dad!” Sydney’s barked voice is a bucket of ice water on my anger. “Dad! Don’t . . . Please.”

Please . It’s the desperate note in that one word that reaches me. I step back, lower my fists. Puffing like a bull. “Let’s just fucking go.”

Nobody protests this time. I lead Syd out of the house. Into the car. Away from the people who once treated me like I was nothing.

We don’t talk on the way home.

But I know Syd’s mad at me.

I pull the car onto the highway, the wind humming in the windows. We sit in silence, like we know something needs to be said, but neither of us knows what. Or who should say it.

So finally, I break the silence. “Syd . . .”

“You always have to end it in a fight, don’t you?”

My teeth grind together. Anger and shame war for control of my emotions; she’s right, she’s so right. My fingers grip the wheel, knuckles white. “He’s not a good person, Syd.”

“And I’m not a little kid!” The anger in her voice takes me aback. Syd doesn’t get mad at me; we don’t fight much, never have. “You can’t keep me in a box. ”

“No,” I agree, if reluctantly. She’s not the baby I tucked into my arms like that could protect her from the world. “But you don’t know him. Jess uses people, and when he’s done with them, he leaves them.”

“But he can help me,” Syd says, her voice so firm I wonder if she’s fighting back tears. “Working with him will look really good for jobs or college or whatever. He can help—”

He can help me in ways you can’t , she doesn’t say, but I hear those words anyway. Because she’s right. I can work for literal decades and not give her things Jess can give her in a few phone calls.

Money, power, connections. Fame. My chest aches with—with what? Shame? Guilt? Fear?

“I’m bringing you with me to work,” I say. And then, because I know that if I don’t get on the ice, with the crowd roaring around me, I’m going to do something I regret. “Then you’re going to Brenda’s.”

“Sure. Whatever.” Syd snorts. “You clearly need to fight somewhere.”

My teeth grind together hard enough to hurt. More guilt and shame flood that hollow cavity of my chest.

Syd speaks before I can find anything to say. “But if you go to the Ice Out, I expect to see you at the tournament.”

My knuckles go white on the wheel.

I don’t tell her that I’ve already been invited.