My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Nine

Mara is still sitting on the edge of the bed with her knees pulled up when Selene calls, before Mara can even finish dialing her.

"You didn't call after the interview," Selene says, no hello, straight into it, which is how Mara knows she's been watching the clock. "You said you would."

"I know. I'm sorry. I got—" Mara stops, presses the heel of her free hand against one eye, exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with jet lag. "It was a lot."

"Tell me."

Mara tells her. Not all of it — not yet, not the stairwell, not the specific shape of the four minutes she spent breathing against cold cinderblock trying to remember how to be a person who wasn't currently falling apart — but enough. The press conference. The corridor. Her name, twice, once caught and once not.

"He said my name," she says, and hears her own voice do something small and unsteady on the last word. "Just — Mara. Like it was nothing. Like five years didn't happen."

"And that undid you."

"It shouldn't have."

"Why not?" Selene's voice is gentle, but there's an edge of challenge in it too, the specific tone she uses when she thinks Mara is about to talk herself into something untrue. "You loved him for two years, Mara. You were engaged, in every way that mattered except the paperwork. A person saying your name after that isn't supposed to feel like nothing. It's supposed to feel like exactly what it felt like. That's not weakness. That's just what's true."

Mara doesn't answer right away. Outside her window, the city has gone fully dark, streetlights coming up along the river, the ordinary evening business of a place she still doesn't know the shape of continuing on without any awareness of the conversation happening four floors up.

"I thought I was past it," she says finally, quiet. "Six years. I built a whole life. I have an apartment I picked out myself, a job I'm good at, you. I thought that meant I'd actually gotten somewhere."

"You have gotten somewhere." Selene's voice softens further, drops the challenge entirely. "Getting somewhere doesn't mean the old place stops existing, Mara. It just means you're not living there anymore. Seeing him again doesn't erase six years of work. It's not a test you're failing by having feelings about it."

"It feels like one."

"I know it does. That doesn't make it true."

Mara pulls the phone closer, curls further into herself on the bed, and for a moment neither of them says anything, the silence comfortable in the specific way it only gets to be between two people who've spent six years learning exactly how much space the other one needs before they're ready to keep talking.

"Can I ask you something," Mara says eventually.

"Always."

"Do you ever think about it? Him. The engagement. Whether things would've—" She stops, unsure how to finish the sentence, unsure if it's even a fair question to ask.

"Whether things would've been easier if I'd just married him like everyone wanted." Selene says it plainly, without flinching, the way she says most things. "No. Not once. Not for a single day. He's a good person, Adrian, whatever else is true about how he handled things with you — but he was never going to be my person, and I was never going to be his, and both of us knew it before either set of parents did. Canceling that arrangement is one of maybe three decisions in my entire life I've never once regretted."

"What are the other two."

"Finding you in those woods." Selene says it simply, no drama in her voice at all, just fact. "And staying."

Mara closes her eyes. Six years, and that particular sentence still lands somewhere underneath her ribs every single time, no less than the first time Selene said something close to it, sitting on the edge of a hospital bed with her own bodyguard waiting awkwardly in the hallway outside.

"I don't know what I would have done without you," Mara says, the words worn smooth from years of meaning them.

"You would have found your way eventually. You're stronger than you give yourself credit for. I just got there a little early, that's all." A pause, and then, gentler: "But I'm glad it was me. I want you to know that. Whatever else has ever been complicated in my life, that part was never complicated at all."

Mara wipes at her eyes with the back of one hand, quick, almost embarrassed even though there's no one here to see it. "You're going to make me cry on a work night."

"You're allowed to cry on a work night. You're allowed to cry on any night. That's not a flaw in your professional armor, Mara, that's just being a person." Selene's voice shifts again, lighter now, deliberately pulling them both back from the edge of something too heavy to sit inside for too long. "Now. Tell me honestly. Are you going to be able to do this assignment? Weeks of this? Because if the answer is no, I will personally call your editor and invent a family emergency, and I don't even care that I don't technically have family to have an emergency with. I'll invent one for the occasion."

Mara laughs, wet and surprised, exactly the reaction Selene was clearly going for. "I can do it."

"I know you can. I'm asking if you want to."

The question sits there for a moment, more honest than anything Mara has let herself consider all day. Does she want to. Does she want weeks of this — of his eyes finding hers across crowded rooms, of unscripted moments in hallways, of a name slipping out of him before he can stop it and landing somewhere in her chest she hasn't fully protected in years.

"I don't know," she admits. "But I know I need to find out. I've spent five years wondering what would happen if I ever saw him again. I think some part of me needs to actually know the answer instead of just guessing at it forever."

"That's fair," Selene says. "That's honest, which is more than you usually give yourself credit for managing on day one of anything hard. Okay. Go to sleep. Eat something real tomorrow. Call me after whatever happens next, good or bad, I don't care which."

"I will."

"I love you. Get some rest."

"I love you too. Thank you — for tonight. For all of it."

"Always," Selene says, and means it, the way she has meant every version of that word for six unbroken years, and then the line goes quiet, and Mara sits alone in a hotel room in a city she still doesn't know the shape of, feeling, for the first time all day, like she might actually be able to breathe.

She doesn't fall asleep for a long time. But when she finally does, it's without the phone still in her hand, and without the drawer at home and the ring inside it anywhere near the front of her mind — small mercies, the only kind she's learned, over six long years, to actually expect.