Page 149 of The Fall

A burst of premature fireworks blooms somewhere to our left, gold and green sparks dying against the dark. Blair tracks them with his eyes, and I track him.

He braces his forearms on the railing. “Twenty minutes till midnight.”

“Happy almost.”

He laughs. I’ve missed his laugh. In my memories, I heard it all the time, and in reality, I used to try to hold it in my mind as I was sobbing on the floor.

His head tilts my way after he sips his Gatorade. His throat bobs, and his eyes narrow on me.

“What?” I ask.

“Feels weird to say it like this, but… there’s something I never told you.” He bites his bottom lip and rolls it between his teeth. “About why you’re in Tampa.”

I go still. “What do you mean?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. He turns his head, looking out over the glittering expanse of Dallas as if the answer is written in the rivers of light below. The hard line of his jaw is clenched.

A thousand impossible explanations flicker through me. He didn’t want me. It was business. It was pity. It was… something else.

Hope is a terrifying thing, rising in your throat after you’ve spent so long learning to live without it. He finally turns back, his eyes finding mine in the glow.

“I watched them waste you in Vancouver, and I hated it.” He breathes in slowly. “Right before your final year on your contract in Vancouver, I told management that you had a shot to be great if someone around you actually gave a shit about your development.”

A roar fills my ears, but it’s just my blood rushing. He saw. He was paying attention when I felt most invisible. The thought is a fault line splitting open the barren ground I’ve learned to walk on.

The wind whips his hair across his forehead, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s waiting for me to absorb it, to understand what he’s not yet said.

“Tampa wasn’t an accident, Torey. I asked them to bring you here.”

I wait for him to say it was one of a million offhand asks, like when he wants the vending machines refilled with peanut-butter M&Ms instead of plain, but I look at his hands and they’re bloodless, white-knuckled, gripping the rail.

“You had—you have—so much talent. Everything you did, all the little things no one saw. I didn’t want to watch you burn out, not when you were doing things right. But—” His voice chokes off and dies.

He turns away. The wind tugs at the collar of his shirt. He looks like he’s trying to swallow something that won’t go down.

“Then Cody died,” he whispers.

The words are a knife, gutting the moment. All the sound from the city below vanishes. That fragile hope I let myself feel only minutes ago shrivels into something shameful and small.

The flute in my hand feels stupidly fragile, a prop from a different play entirely. “You don’t have to?—”

“You deserve to hear this.” He turns to me fully. “I spiraled after he died. I didn’t tell anyone how bad it was, not even Hayes.” His shoulders are bunched with a sorrow so vast it could pull the stars from their orbits.

“All I had was anger. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t see past it or through it. I couldn’t play, couldn’t lead the team, couldn’t be the captain. I told Coach I was quitting, but he convinced me to take a leave of absence.” His lips clamp shut. “But Cody was living with me before he died, and when I was home, I was surrounded by?—”

There’s a hum in the air, like the night is cradling his pain.

“Then, so much shit happened last year with the team. I had to come back, but the only way I could survive was to never let myself talk about him or think about him, or…” He exhales. “And I didn’t know until it was done that management thought bringing you here would be some kind of magic wand to fix me because I had said that I wanted to be the guy to give you a fighting chance.”

My entire life trajectory changed because his brother died.

“You skate like him, you know. When you got here, I couldn’t even look at you without—” He stops again. His eyes are dark and soft and wrecked. “Some days, watching you on the ice was like watching his ghost. And when we play together, it reminds me of when I played with Cody.”

He’s not looking at me anymore. His gaze fixes on some distant point in the Dallas skyline, but he’s not seeing the city.

“I didn’t mean to be his ghost. I didn’t know?—”

“How could you?” The question drops from him like surrender. “You were just trying to play hockey.” His breath shudders out.