My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Thirty-Five

"I found out I was pregnant three weeks after you left," Mara says, and the words, once she finally lets them out into the quiet courtyard air, feel both impossibly heavy and, after five years of carrying them alone, strangely like a weight finally being set down.

Adrian goes very still beside her, all the exhaustion from tonight's game draining instantly from his face, replaced by something Mara can't fully name — shock, certainly, but underneath it, already, a dawning horror that suggests some part of him is doing the same math she's spent five years doing, understanding, in real time, exactly what that timeline means.

"You were—" He stops, can't finish the sentence, his voice barely above a whisper. "Mara."

"I didn't know when you left. I want you to know that first. I wasn't keeping anything from you when the text came through. I found out after, entirely alone, in a campus health clinic with a nurse who was kind about it but who was, ultimately, a stranger, because I had no one else to call." Mara keeps her voice steady, the practiced, careful cadence she's used for five years to discuss anything difficult, though she can feel it straining now, close to breaking in a way it rarely does anymore. "I didn't know how to reach you. I didn't know if I should. You'd made it very clear, with that text, that you didn't want to be reached at all."

"I would have—" Adrian's voice breaks, real anguish moving across his face. "God, Mara, if I had known—"

"I know. I've thought about that a thousand times, what you would have done if you'd known. I don't actually know the answer, and for a long time, not knowing was its own kind of torture. Whether telling you would have changed anything. Whether you would have come back. Whether it would have just made everything worse." Mara looks down at her hands, steadying herself before continuing. "I didn't get the chance to find out. Because six weeks after you left, before I'd figured out what to do, before I'd found the courage to even consider telling you — I lost the pregnancy."

The silence that follows is total, the courtyard's ambient city noise seeming to fade entirely around the weight of what she's just said. Adrian makes a sound that isn't quite words, something raw and wordless, and when Mara finally looks up at him, his face is wet, tears he isn't bothering to hide or wipe away, his whole body curved forward as though the words have physically struck him.

"I'm so sorry," he says, finally, the words barely audible. "I'm so sorry, Mara. I don't — there's nothing I can say that's big enough for what I just heard. I left you alone with that. I left you alone with all of it."

"You didn't know."

"That doesn't make it better. I still left you alone. I still made a decision that meant you had no one to call, at the worst moment of your entire life, because I decided silence was easier than an actual conversation." His voice is thick with grief, real and immediate, and Mara watches him process, in real time, five years of consequences he never fully understood he was responsible for. "What happened after? Please. I need to know. I need to understand what you actually went through, even though I know it's going to be terrible to hear."

Mara takes a slow breath, steadying herself for the hardest part still to come. "The miscarriage happened in a hospital room, alone, because there was no one to call. My grandmother had died two years before that. My parents died when I was young. I had no other family. I had classmates, acquaintances, people who would have helped if I'd asked, but I didn't know how to ask, and honestly, I didn't have the strength to explain what I needed help with." She pauses, gathering herself. "After that, I fell apart. Genuinely, completely apart. I stopped going to classes. I stopped answering calls. I convinced myself, somewhere in the middle of it, that if the two people who were supposed to love me most in the world — you, and the family I never really got the chance to have — had both, in their own ways, left, then I must simply be someone the world didn't want. That's not a healthy thought. I understand that now, with a lot of therapy and a lot of years of distance. But it was completely real to me then."

Adrian is openly crying now, silent, devastated, and Mara reaches over instinctively, takes his hand, the gesture more for her own steadiness than his comfort, though she suspects it serves both purposes.

"I need to tell you the rest," she says, quiet. "I need you to hear all of it, even the hardest part, because I don't think either of us can move forward with only half the truth between us anymore."

"Okay," he says, barely a whisper. "Tell me. Whatever it is. I want to know."

"There was a night," Mara says, choosing her words with careful precision, "when I didn't think I could keep carrying any of it. I made a choice that night that I'm not proud of, that I've spent years understanding and forgiving myself for, slowly, with a lot of help. I'm not going to give you the details of that night. Not because I don't trust you with them, but because I've learned that some details don't need to be relived, only acknowledged. What matters is what happened next."

Adrian nods, unable to speak, gripping her hand like something solid to hold onto.

"A girl found me," Mara continues. "A stranger, running through the woods near my grandmother's old property for reasons entirely her own, nothing to do with me at all. She got help. She stayed with me at the hospital, a total stranger, refusing to leave even when the staff told her she could. She became, over the following months and years, the closest thing to family I've had since I was eighteen years old. She's the reason I survived that year at all. She's the reason I'm sitting here right now, able to tell you any of this."

"Who," Adrian says, though something in his voice suggests he already, dreadfully, suspects the answer.

"Selene," Mara says, quiet, watching the realization land fully on his face. "Selene Marsh saved my life, Adrian. The girl your parents wanted you to marry. She found me in those woods, running from her own crisis that same night, and she's been the family I never had ever since."

Adrian makes a sound that's half sob, half disbelieving laugh, the specific sound of someone confronting an irony so enormous it briefly overwhelms even the grief underneath it. "She never told me. All these years, she never once told me."

"She wouldn't. It was never her story to tell. It was mine, and I wasn't ready, not for five years, until right now, sitting in this courtyard with you."

They sit together in silence for a long moment, the city settling into late-night quiet around them, and Mara feels, having finally said the words out loud after five years of carrying them alone, something enormous shifting in her chest — not resolution, not yet, but the specific, exhausted relief of having finally set down a weight she didn't fully realize how tired she'd become of carrying.

"There's more," she says, quiet. "About why you actually left. I need to hear that part too, before either of us can figure out what comes next. But I needed you to know this first. I needed you to understand what actually happened, in full, before we talk about anything else."

Adrian wipes at his face, still visibly shaken, and turns to face her fully, something fierce and grieving and entirely sincere in his eyes.

"Thank you," he says, quiet. "For trusting me with that. After everything. I don't know if I deserve it, but thank you."

"You don't have to deserve it," Mara says, echoing, without quite meaning to, words Selene has said to her a hundred times over six years. "You just have to actually hear it. That's what I needed, all along. Someone to actually hear it."

"I'm hearing it," Adrian says, voice breaking. "I'm hearing all of it. I promise you, Mara, I am never going to stop hearing it."

The courtyard is quiet around them, the river beyond the fence dark and steady in the late-night stillness, and for the first time in five years, Mara feels the specific, fragile beginning of something she'd almost given up hoping for — not the past undone, that's never going to be possible, but something new, finally, honestly, beginning to take its place.