My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Mara calls Selene the next morning, still sitting in bed with the previous night's conversation replaying in fragments through her mind, unsure where to even begin explaining everything that happened in that quiet courtyard.

"You sound different," Selene says, almost immediately, before Mara's said more than hello. "Good different or bad different? I can't tell yet."

"I told him," Mara says. "Everything. The pregnancy. The miscarriage. The attempt. You."

There's a long silence on the line, long enough that Mara checks to make sure the call hasn't dropped.

"Everything," Selene repeats, finally, her voice careful, processing. "How did he take it?"

"He cried. Genuinely, completely fell apart, in a way I've honestly never seen from him, not even in college when things got hard. He kept apologizing, over and over, like the words weren't enough but he didn't know what else to give me." Mara pulls her knees up, hugging them, the memory still raw and immediate. "And then he told me his side. Why he actually left."

"What did he say?"

Mara walks through it — the ultimatum, the security assessment, the messages his parents had somehow intercepted that were worse than anything Mara had ever shown him, his twenty-one-year-old panic curdling into the worst decision of his life. Selene listens without interrupting, the way she always does, and when Mara finally finishes, there's another long silence before she speaks.

"I believe him," Selene says, finally, quiet. "For what it's worth. I remember, actually, during the brief period we were both miserable together — he mentioned once, in passing, something about his parents having 'concerns' about your safety. I didn't understand what he meant at the time, and honestly, I was too wrapped up in my own misery to press him on it. I wish I had. I might have understood something sooner."

"He didn't know about you," Mara says. "That you were the one who found me. He had no idea, all these years, that the girl his parents wanted him to marry was the same girl who saved the life of the person he actually loved."

"God." Selene's voice carries genuine shock, something Mara rarely hears from her. "That's — I don't even have words for how strange that is. All these years, and neither of us knew the other one knew."

"He said it changed something for him, hearing it. Like the wreckage he thought he'd caused wasn't quite as total as he'd believed, because something extraordinary had grown out of it anyway. Not that it excuses what he did. But it seemed to genuinely matter to him, in a way I wasn't expecting."

"How do you feel? About all of it. About him." Selene's voice softens, gentle but direct, the way she always is when she wants an honest answer rather than a comfortable one.

Mara considers the question for a long moment, turning it over carefully before answering. "I feel lighter. Which surprises me. I thought telling him would feel like ripping something open all over again, and it did hurt, but underneath the hurt there's something else — relief, maybe, or just the simple fact of not carrying it alone anymore. I don't know what happens next between us. But I know I don't regret finally saying it out loud, to him specifically, after five years of only ever saying it to you."

"That's a real answer," Selene says, warmth returning to her voice. "I'm proud of you. Genuinely. That took more courage than you probably realize."

"It didn't feel courageous. It felt like I didn't have a choice anymore. Like the alternative — staying silent, staying safe, staying protected — had become somehow worse than the risk of finally saying it."

"That's what courage actually is, most of the time," Selene says. "It's rarely the dramatic, obvious kind. It's usually just choosing the harder true thing over the easier false one, because the false one finally stopped being bearable." A pause, and then, lighter, deliberately shifting the weight of the conversation: "So. Where does this leave things? Are you two — is there an 'us' forming here, or is this just closure?"

"I don't know," Mara admits. "We didn't make any promises last night. It felt too big for promises, honestly. We just — told the truth, finally, both of us, and sat with it together. I think we both need time to figure out what comes next, separately and together."

"That's fair. That's actually really mature, for what it's worth, coming from two people who clearly have a track record of making enormous romantic decisions in stairwells and hotel courtyards at emotionally overwhelming moments."

Mara laughs, surprised by it, some of the heaviness of the morning lifting slightly. "That's fair too."

"For what it's worth," Selene says, quieter now, "I think you should let yourself hope a little. I know hope has cost you before. I know you've spent five years building walls specifically designed to keep hope like this from getting close enough to hurt you again. But Mara — the version of him who sat in that courtyard and cried while you told him the hardest truths of your entire life, that's not the version who left you a nine-word text message. Whatever else is true, he's grown into someone capable of actually hearing you now. That matters."

"I know," Mara says, quiet. "I felt it too. I just don't know how to trust it yet. Not fully. Not after everything."

"You don't have to trust it fully today. You just have to keep showing up honestly, one day at a time, and see what actually grows out of that. That's all any of us can really do."

They talk for a while longer, easier now, the heaviest part of the conversation behind them, and by the time they hang up, Mara feels something settling into place that she hasn't felt in longer than she can remember — not certainty, not yet, but the specific, fragile permission to actually hope for something, rather than simply bracing herself against its absence.

Her phone buzzes almost the moment the call with Selene ends. Adrian.

How are you feeling this morning? I've been thinking about last night nonstop.

Lighter, Mara types back, honest. Scared, still. But lighter.

Same. Both of those things. A pause, then: I need to talk to my parents. Really talk to them, not the careful, distant version we've been doing for five years. I think I owe that to both of us — to actually confront what they did, instead of just quietly absorbing it the way I always have.

That sounds hard.

It is. But I think I've spent five years avoiding hard conversations, and look where that got both of us. I'm done avoiding them.

Mara reads the message twice, feeling something warm and cautiously hopeful settle in her chest, watching, for the first time in five years, real evidence of a man choosing honesty over comfort, even when honesty is going to cost him something significant.

I'm proud of you, she types back, meaning it completely.

I don't know if I've earned that yet, he writes back. But I'm going to try to.

Mara sets her phone down, and for the first time since she landed in this city, allows herself, cautiously, tentatively, to believe that trying might actually be enough.