Fake Skating(109)

“Wait.” All the sounds around me disappeared as I asked, “You threw them away?”

He threw. Postcards. Away…?

“I mean, as a parent, it’s a little concerning when there’s a kid who won’t stop sending your daughter messages you can’t even decipher—”

“I can’t believe this,” I said, my thoughts racing back to the things Alec had said when I broke up with him, the things that had seemed to make zero sense. I wrote you every fucking week. “So… he was still sending them?”

“All the time,” he said. “Letters, too. And you were struggling to adjust after what had happened in Texas, so it just seemed better to cut that off.”

Letters??

“Oh my God,” I said in disbelief, the world stopping as the truth of everything hit me. “You threw away his postcards.”

Alec had never ghosted me.

“You threw them away,” I repeated, totally in shock.

He had kept writing.

Which meant that he hadn’t changed at all.

I closed my eyes, because this also meant that when Istopped writing, brokenhearted by his abandonment, I was actually ghosting him.

Abandoning him.

Oh no.

At least this time there aren’t any letters for you to ignore.

Now it made sense, the way he’d seemed mad at me from the minute I showed up in Southview.

How could you walk away when I needed you?

He thought I’d ghosted him.

“How could you do that?” I asked, my voice cracking. “How could you just throw them away?”

“Honey,” he said, and I could tell by his tone that he was shocked it was a big deal. “I didn’t think those little messages meant anything to you.”

They actually meant everything.

“I—I have to go,” I said, needing to get off the phone and figure out what this meant. Just when I thought my dad and I were moving forward, we were moving two steps back. It was soul-crushing. “We aren’t done with this, but I have to hang up now.”

“I love you, kiddo,” he said, which somehow made it worse and better, all at the same time. “I’m sorry.”

“You too. Bye.”

I hung up, shaken by the revelation as I left the hallway and went back into the pub. I pushed through the crowded bar, numb, because this changed everything.

But when I got to the table, my grandpa looked over at me with a weird expression.

One I hadn’t seen before.

“What?” I asked, glancing up at the big TV.

I expected to see that St. John’s Academy had scored again or something, but it looked like the game had stopped.

And then I saw why.

A player was down.

A player wearing the number-seven jersey.

Alec.

My entire body went cold as I saw him lying on the ice, surrounded by his teammates as a stretcher came out.

“Oh my God, what happened?” I asked, unable to look away from the big screen, my heart in my throat.

As if on cue, the TV switched to an instant replay.

It showed Alec going after the puck, his back to the camera, and then he was checked from behind, a blue jersey slamming into him at full speed. Worthington.I watched in horror as Alec flew into the boards, headfirst, then went down on the ice.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

“Grab your coat,” Grandpa Mick said, getting out of his chair. “We gotta go.”

“What?” I couldn’t look away from the screen, paralyzed. “Where?”

He gestured to the guy behind the bar that he wanted to settle his tab and said, “We’re going to the hospital.”





CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT Alec




“So as soon as the doc gets here, we’ll get you wheeled down for surgery.”

“Thanks,” I said, a big fan of the nurse because whatever he’d put in my IV had calmed my shoulder way the hell down.

Also, his name was Dan, which I found to be strangely amusing as the meds did their thing.

“Great,” my mom said, nodding.

My dad was still at the X, taking videos of the celebration. He’d FaceTimed us with thirty seconds left in the game, so at least I’d been able to virtually be there when we got the dub.

As it turned out, karma was a five-minute major. And grounds for a suspension.

Nothing gave me more joy than learning that Worthington’s time in the box had allowed us to score two goals during the power play.

Fucking yes, holy shit, we were moving on.

It was literally Benji’s fault that his team lost, so that was just the sweetest irony, the cherry on top of the quarterfinal-win sundae.

Of course, as soon as time expired I had to put away the phone and go down to X-ray, followed by an immediate surgical consultation, so not everything was a win. My collarbone was fractured, and my labrum was shredded (and probably had been for a while).

Hence the surgery.

But the painkillers were providing help in multiple ways. In addition to numbing my shoulder, they were allowing me to notfreak the fuck out about what this injury meant. Being out for three months, more medical bills—this was a nightmare.

But I was calm about it for the moment.

There was a knock on the door of my ER room, and when I looked over, I saw Mick Boche.