Page 1

Chapter

One

My fingers traced over the application packet. The Rhodes Scholarship. A prestigious award for academic excellence. Leadership. Character. Commitment to service.

Zero pressure.

For a second, I wondered why I’d even picked up the application. The University of Oxford was after geniuses or future prime ministers. People who ran nonprofits out of their dorm rooms, not mixed-race women from Cow Town. Even if they did happen to be excellent at math.

I flipped to the front page and started to read with my purple pen at the ready.

International post-grad study. The idea sent tingles to my toes.

While I’d at least crossed the Canadian border and even an ocean thanks to the trip to Hawaii I took with my mom last Christmas, I’d never travelled abroad.

My mom had never travelled abroad. Quebec was the closest thing to European culture either of us had experienced, and I was itching to get out, and fall would be a perfect time.

I highlighted a few dates and application requirements, then set the packet down on my newly thrifted computer desk when I got to the section on extracurriculars. It was shocking how quickly my sense of self disintegrated with one bolded headline.

My grades were perfect. I was on the Dean’s list. I’d just submitted a paper that made my differential equations professor raise both eyebrows and mutter, “Impressive.” The best compliment I’d ever received from anyone in the math department.

I’d done everything asked of me with flying colours, but leadership?

Service? I wasn’t exactly organizing protests or feeding the homeless.

Unless you counted feeding Sharla and Crystal for three weeks last fall when they forgot to grocery shop.

I glanced at the little corkboard above my desk.

Pinned to it was a faded postcard from Maui, a colour-coded study schedule for finals, and a photo of my mom and me from Christmas—both of us in leis, her arm around my shoulder.

She’d cried when I told her I wanted to apply for grad school overseas.

Not just because she didn’t want me to go, but because there was no way in hell she could afford it.

I’d paid my own way here at Douglas with scholarships and summer work.

Without the Rhodes, we both knew this dream was dead in the water.

I reached for my pen again and tapped it against the corner of the pamphlet. Get involved. Show initiative. Serve the community. I had six months until I needed to submit. Six months to figure out how to pad my resume and?—

A knock rapped on my half-closed bedroom door, followed by a creak as it swung wider. “Please tell me you’re not double-checking your GPA calculation for fun again.”

I looked up to see Tash standing there, one hand on her hip, the other holding a Diet Coke can with a blue-and-white-striped straw poking out. Her curly red hair was twisted up with a pencil, and she was wearing a Velvet Underground T-shirt that was technically mine.

I sighed. “Not for fun. For existential clarity.”

She stepped inside, her toenails the colour of caution tape today. “You know what would give existential clarity . . . ”

I grinned. “I’m not sleeping with Garrett.”

Tash chortled and yelled out the door, “Sorry, G! It’s a no again today!” She waited for the front door of the apartment to slam before flopping onto the bed.

Tash was an art history major and, after backpacking through Europe the previous summer, was convinced a study of emotionally repressed oil paintings was the only path to true enlightenment.

Garrett was her best friend. Who also happened to have an enormous, very public crush on me.

If he didn’t smoke weed like it was his daily multivitamin, I might have been interested.

She reached out and plucked the Rhodes pamphlet from my desk. “Oh, we’re in scholarship crisis mode. Excellent. Should I grab snacks or are we skipping straight to wine and despair?”

“Neither.” I snatched it back. “I’m just considering my options.”

“Babe, you have plenty of options that don’t involve jumping through bureaucratic hoops.”

I gave her a look. We’d had this conversation before. Tash insisted I only needed seven hundred dollars for a plane ticket and a good backpack to do all the studying in Europe I needed. I was convinced I’d be snatched and forced into sex trafficking if I spent the night at a hostel.

So, we were at an impasse.

I slumped down beside her, leaning back on the decorative pillows I’d had since I was fourteen. “You’re connected to the world of social justice. Any causes I can start a rally for? A committee I can join?”

Tash snorted. “I hear the Manatees are having a moment.”

I blinked. “Fighting for . . . their land rights?”

“They’re sea creatures. Like whales, but cuter. Nipples in their fin crotch.”

I made a face. “Doesn’t sound like something I’d be into.”

Tash dropped the packet. “What, fin-crotch nipples or saving sea creatures?”

I laughed. “Both. Either. Ugh. What am I going to do?”

“Easy. Just tell them the truth. You’re a terrible person who doesn’t care about anything besides algorithms and, oddly, minor league hockey.”

I gasped. “Damn it, what time is it?” I leaned over Tash and scrambled for my watch. She snatched it off the nightstand and handed it to me.

6:44 p.m. The game started at seven. Which meant I was officially ten minutes behind my usual leaving time and twenty minutes behind Shar’s. Luckily, she’d gone over to the rink early tonight with Rob, so I only had Crystal to disappoint.

I hopped off the bed with a hasty goodbye to Tash, grabbed my coat and keys, and half-ran, half-hopped down the apartment stairs like the floor was lava.

Outside, the spring wind cut across the parking lot, still carrying that icy edge that screamed “Remember, this is Alberta, don’t get cocky.

” My poor Rabbit was parked under the same sad street lamp it always was, looking like it had just finished a twelve-round fight with a snowplow. To be fair, it probably had.

The driver-side mirror was still duct-taped, and the left headlight had flickered since February. I threw myself into the driver’s seat, jammed the key into the ignition, and whispered a small prayer to the gods of German engineering. The engine sputtered, coughed, and finally choked awake.

“Thank you.” I patted the cracked dashboard. “You’re a queen. A temperamental, gas-guzzling queen.” I tore out of the lot and headed toward Crystal’s place, hitting every red light like it was some cosmic joke.

Crystal was waiting on the curb in her ridiculous fuzzy earmuffs and her scarf that matched mine, sipping a Slurpee like it was already July. I leaned over and flung the door open. “So sorry I’m late!”

She hopped in, and I peeled away from the curb as the door shut. The Rabbit whined but obeyed, bless her patchwork soul. We crested the hill leading to the rink, and I couldn’t help but grin.

I loved these nights. Not just because Shar got aggressively into chirping at the other team’s bench or because Crystal brought me snacks in her Mary Poppins bag of a purse. I loved them because hockey, in its own ridiculous, high-speed, sweaty way, made sense.

People thought math was rigid—just numbers, formulas, and logic. But good math? Real math? It was full of flow. Of momentum. Of elegant, precise chaos. Like a perfect pass sequence or a power play that snapped into place so cleanly it felt like watching a proof unfold across the ice.

Hockey was math in motion. Every breakout was a problem set. Every shift was a permutation of variables—angles, velocity, pressure, timing. There were infinite ways to get from puck drop to goal horn, but the most beautiful ones followed an internal rhythm. You could feel when it was right.

Players didn’t realize they were doing math, but they were.

Vectors. Trajectories. Instantaneous adjustments with spatial reasoning.

The best players didn’t just react. They anticipated.

It was all there: the geometry of a tight-angle shot, the symmetry of a well-executed cycle, the algorithm of a three-on-two that ended with the goalie sprawled and hopeless.

It wasn’t rigid. It was poetry. The only kind I could follow.

“Is Chase going to be there tonight?” Crystal asked.

A blush rose to my cheeks. “Uh . . . how would I know?”

Crystal raised an eyebrow, grinning. “All I have to do is say his name?—”

“Stop. He’s my stepbrother.”

“ Was. For what, a few months?”

Technically less. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap.”

“You definitely snapped.”

“Yeah, well. The whole thing is just . . . weird. I don’t know how to act around him. That’s all this is.” I gestured to my flushed neck.

“Uh-huh.”

“Seriously.”

“Dude, Chase is hot?—”

“Can you not?”

“He’s twenty-four, a hockey player, graduated. ”

I laughed and waved her off, trying to hide my reaction to the sudden swoop in my belly.

I didn’t know if Chase was objectively hot or not because to me, he was an icon.

The symbol of everything I wanted and could never have in high school.

His physical appearance back then was beside the point.

It was the way he didn’t seem to care. The way he moved.

Fluid and almost lazy. The way he sprawled out in his chair.

The way he always breathed out a little and dropped his eyes when he smiled.

Like he was in on some secret joke that, at fourteen, I would’ve chopped off my left arm to hear.

Just the thought of him slipping his hand into the pocket of his faded jeans back then or leaning against his locker at school .

. . All of that was why I reacted the way I did when my mom announced that her new boyfriend, the D-bag who always sat on our couch after school and waited for her to make him dinner, was Chase’s dad.

Chase—the guy every girl swooned over at school. His dad.