My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Thirty-Three

The morning arrives with the specific, fragile hope of two people who have finally agreed to say everything, and it takes almost no time at all for the world to intervene.

Mara wakes early, before her alarm, the way she always does on days that matter, and spends the first hour turning over exactly what she's going to say, how she's going to begin — with the pregnancy, or the breakup, or somewhere further back, at the beginning of everything, so he has the full shape of it before the hardest parts land. She's rehearsed versions of this conversation in her head a thousand times over five years, always in the abstract, always as a hypothetical she never fully believed would actually happen. Now that it's real, scheduled, agreed to by both of them the night before, she finds the rehearsed versions feel suddenly inadequate, too tidy, too composed for something that's never going to come out clean no matter how many times she practices it.

Her phone buzzes at eight. Adrian.

Something's come up. Team meeting got moved up, emergency roster situation, one of the guys got hurt in warmups. Not sure how long it'll run. I'm sorry.

Mara reads the message twice, disappointment settling heavy and immediate despite her best efforts to be reasonable about it. It's okay. Tournament comes first. We'll find another time.

I don't want you to think I'm avoiding it, he writes back, fast, clearly anticipating exactly the doubt she's fighting off. I promise you, this is real. The meeting is real. I want this conversation more than I've wanted almost anything in five years.

I believe you, she types, and mostly means it, though a small, old, well-practiced part of her — the part built out of five years of broken promises and unfinished sentences — can't quite fully quiet the doubt entirely.

The meeting runs long, then longer, the roster situation apparently more complicated than a single morning briefing, and by early afternoon Adrian is pulled directly into a full practice session covering for the injured teammate's absence, no gap in the schedule until well into the evening.

He texts updates when he can, brief and apologetic, and Mara spends the day working — filing a quarterfinal recap, catching up on emails from Callum, trying to keep her hands and mind occupied with anything other than the growing, uncomfortable sense that today's conversation might not happen after all, might slip away the way so many almost-conversations have slipped away over the last few weeks, always interrupted, always postponed, always just out of reach.

She finds herself, mid-afternoon, doing something she hasn't let herself do in years — pulling up an old email draft, unsent, written years ago in a moment of raw grief she can no longer fully access the specifics of, addressed to an email account of his she isn't even sure still exists. She reads it for the first time in years, her own younger voice unfamiliar and devastating on the screen.

I don't understand why you won't just tell me what I did wrong. I keep trying to figure out what version of me would have made you stay, and I can't find it, because I don't think it was ever about a version of me at all. I think you just decided I wasn't worth staying for, and I don't know how to live with not knowing why.

She closes the laptop, chest tight, unable to keep reading. She'd forgotten, somewhere along the way, exactly how raw that period had been, how much of herself she'd poured into words she never even sent, and she understands, sitting alone in a hotel room with the draft still glowing faintly in her memory, exactly how much is actually riding on tonight's conversation finally happening — not just closure, not just an answer, but some kind of proof, finally, that the version of herself who wrote that email wasn't simply, permanently wrong about everything.

Adrian texts again at nine that night, exhausted, apologetic, the practice having run well past its planned end due to a coaching staff scramble to reorganize lines for tomorrow's semifinal.

I'm so sorry. Today got away from me completely. Can we do tomorrow? I promise, first thing, before anything else gets scheduled.

Mara stares at the message for a long moment, feeling the familiar, old ache of disappointment she's spent five years learning to manage, and forces herself, deliberately, to separate today's genuine scheduling chaos from the pattern it's uncomfortably echoing.

Tomorrow's fine, she types, finally. I understand. Truly. The tournament has to come first right now.

It doesn't have to come first with everything. Just today, unfortunately. A pause, and then: I've been thinking about it all day, even in between drills. I keep running through what I want to say. I don't want you to think today happening this way means anything about how much I actually want this conversation.

I don't think that, Mara writes back, and finds, examining her own feelings honestly, that she mostly believes it. Mostly.

Can I ask you something, he writes, a few minutes later. Whatever you were going to tell me tomorrow — is it going to change anything? Between us, I mean. Whatever you tell me, is it going to make you want less of this, going forward?

Mara considers the question for a long time before answering, aware of exactly how much weight it's carrying, aware, too, of how little she actually knows the answer herself.

I don't know, she types, finally, honest. I think it might change everything. I think it's supposed to. That's kind of the point of finally telling someone the truth — it changes what they know, and what they know changes what happens next. I can't promise you it won't change anything, Adrian. I can only promise you it's the truth, whatever it does to us afterward.

Okay, he writes back, after a long pause. I'd rather have the truth and whatever it changes than another five years of not knowing. I mean that.

Get some sleep, Mara types, feeling something steadier settle into her chest despite the day's disappointment. You have a semifinal tomorrow. We'll talk after.

After the semifinal. I promise.

I'm going to hold you to that.

Good, he writes back. I think I need someone to.

Mara sets her phone down finally, the hotel room quiet around her, and thinks, staring at the ceiling in the dark, about the email draft still sitting unsent in an old account, about five years of almost-conversations finally converging toward something that feels, for the first time, genuinely inevitable rather than perpetually postponed.

Tomorrow, she thinks. After the semifinal. After five years, one more day feels almost bearable, if it's actually, finally, the last one.

She falls asleep slower than she'd like, but she does, eventually, fall asleep — and for the first time in longer than she can remember, she doesn't dream about the stairwell at all. She dreams, instead, about a conversation she hasn't had yet, one she can't quite hear the words of, only the feeling of finally, finally being heard.