My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Eighteen

The subject of his parents comes up almost by accident, somewhere past the midpoint of the bus ride, in a lull between easier stories, and Mara feels the shift in the air before either of them fully registers what's happening.

They've been talking about the mutual professor again, some tangent about his notoriously chaotic grading system, when Adrian mentions, offhand, that his mother had once tried to intervene on his behalf over a contested grade — "she called the department chair directly, it was mortifying, I didn't speak to her for a week" — and the sentence lands in the space between them with more weight than its casual delivery suggests, both of them going quiet at the same moment, as though the mention of his mother has opened a door neither of them planned to walk through tonight.

"How are they," Mara asks, careful, testing the ground. "Your parents."

"Fine." He says it too fast, the word arriving with the same reflexive economy he uses for every question he'd rather not actually answer. "Busy. My dad's still consulting, my mom's still on every charity board in Ashford that'll have her."

"That's not what I asked."

Something flickers across his face, and for a moment Mara thinks she's pushed too hard, too fast, undone the easy rhythm they'd built over the last hour of low, comfortable conversation. But he doesn't shut the door entirely. He just goes quiet for a moment, looking out the dark window at the highway sliding past, before he answers.

"We're better than we were," he says, finally. "Not good. Better. It took a long time."

"Better how?"

"I don't really talk to them about certain things. We've found a version of normal that works as long as certain subjects stay closed." He glances at her, something careful and apologetic in his expression. "You can probably guess which subjects."

Mara's chest tightens, an old, familiar ache surfacing before she can stop it. She thinks about a woman at a game two days ago, a cold, assessing look aimed her way from across a crowded corridor, gone before Mara could fully process it — Eleanor Cole, she'd assumed at the time, though she'd never confirmed it, never let herself confirm it, because confirming it would have meant acknowledging exactly how much that look had cost her, unprepared and unprovoked, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

"I saw her," Mara says, quiet. "Two days ago. At the arena. At least, I think it was her."

Adrian goes very still. "What happened?"

"Nothing happened. She just — looked at me. For a second. Then she was gone." Mara keeps her voice level, professional, the way she's trained herself to discuss almost anything difficult. "It was fine."

"It wasn't fine." Adrian's jaw tightens, something angry and protective moving behind his eyes that Mara hasn't seen from him all week. "I'm sorry. That shouldn't have happened. I'll talk to her."

"You don't have to do that."

"I want to." He says it with a firmness that surprises her, something in his voice she hasn't heard since the college version of him used to say almost exactly this, almost exactly this same protective edge, right before everything fell apart. "She doesn't get to do that. Not to you. Not after—" He stops himself, the sentence closing off mid-thought, and Mara watches him visibly decide not to finish it, whatever it was going to be.

"After what?"

"Nothing." He shakes his head, quick, deliberate. "It doesn't matter."

She doesn't push. She's learned, over the course of this week, exactly how far she can go before he closes the door entirely, and she's close enough to that line right now that pushing further feels like a risk she isn't ready to take, not tonight, not on a bus somewhere between two host cities with a whole tournament still ahead of them.

They talk about easier things for the rest of the ride, but the ease from earlier doesn't fully return — something more careful settling between them instead, both of them aware, without saying so, of exactly how close they'd just come to a conversation neither of them was ready to have.

Mara's hotel room that night is quiet, Selene having flown back to Chicago that morning for the board meeting she'd been dreading, and Mara finds herself, well past midnight, doing something she has told herself for five years she wasn't going to do.

She opens her laptop. She types, into the search bar, before she can talk herself out of it: Richard Cole Ashford Illinois.

The results come back fast, mostly professional — a consulting firm's leadership page, a headshot of a man with Adrian's jaw and none of his warmth, a handful of local business journal mentions about acquisitions and quarterly earnings that mean nothing to her. She scrolls past all of it, searching for something else, something she isn't entirely sure she wants to find, until she gets to an archived society page from a local Ashford paper, six years old, a black-tie charity gala photo with a caption identifying Richard and Eleanor Cole among the evening's notable attendees.

She stares at the photo for a long time. Eleanor is elegant, composed, exactly the kind of woman Mara remembers glimpsing at a handful of college hockey games all those years ago, always at a careful distance, always watching with an expression Mara had, at twenty, been too young and too in love to fully interpret as anything other than reserved politeness. She understands it differently now, six years and a great deal of hard-won perspective later — recognizes, in that careful, composed distance, the specific quality of someone who has already decided, long before any actual conversation takes place, exactly how a person doesn't measure up.

She searches further, unable to stop herself now that she's started, and finds an old profile piece on Richard Cole from a regional business magazine, years old, mostly about his consulting firm's growth trajectory, but with one paragraph, buried deep in the piece, about family — a brief mention of Adrian, "a promising young hockey player," and a line, almost throwaway, about the family's long-standing friendship with "the Marsh family," a business relationship going back decades, the kind of detail that, six years ago, would have meant nothing to her and now lands with the full, devastating weight of everything she's since learned about an arranged engagement neither of the people actually involved had wanted.

She closes the laptop, finally, somewhere past one in the morning, her chest tight with an old grief she thought she'd mostly worked through, resurfacing now with a specificity she hadn't braced herself for — not just the abstract fact of his parents' disapproval, which she's carried for six years, but the actual faces, the actual names, the actual paper trail of a life that was always going to have very specific, very concrete reasons not to want her in it.

She thinks about Adrian's voice on the bus tonight — she doesn't get to do that, not after— — and the sentence he never finished, and wonders, lying awake in the dark, exactly what word was supposed to come next. Not after everything. Not after what happened. Not after what she cost you.

She doesn't know. She isn't sure, six years later, that she's actually ready to know.

She falls asleep eventually with the laptop closed and her phone dark on the nightstand, and dreams, for the first time in longer than she can remember, about a stairwell, and a promise, and a version of forever that never got the chance to survive contact with two people who never wanted her to have it at all.