Page 95 of Goalie and the Girl Next Door
I press my palm to my temple. My fingers are clammy. I can’t get warm.
What am I doing?
What am I doing?
Hockey, my sport, the one that gave me a lifeline when I had nothing else, is slipping away from me.
I can’t play like this. I can’t think, can’t track the puck like I need to, can’t even breathe when the lights hit me just so. I’m losing the one thing I’ve spent my whole life building. I clawed my way up and left everything behind. My country. Every other version of a life I could have lived. I gave it all to the game.
And now I can feel it, the way a goalie feels a bad bounce before it ever hits the ice.
The end.
I pull the blanket up higher and tuck it under my chin.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
The dream fills me again. A house that creaks with character. A long career with fans in the stands and my name on a jersey. Sunday mornings with the woman I love beside me, her laugh echoing through a kitchen we built together. A kid or two. A dog with a ridiculous name. Some version of permanence I never had growing up, even with my mother’s best efforts.
But now the house is falling apart, my body’s giving out, and the future I let myself believe in is slipping through my fingers.
And then there’s Marcy.
Marcy, with her quiet fire and numbers that never lie, and a heart so big it scares me. Marcy, who looked at me during that sunrise like I was the only man for her.
I kissed her like I meant it, because I did. Every breath, every heartbeat, every piece of me was hers.
I am in love with Marcy Fontaine.
But now I’m losing my dream, my body, my team. I can’tstand the thought of losing her, too. Which is why I cannot see her.
If I see her, I’ll stay. I’ll stay, and I’ll fall, and I’ll ruin everything.
This body of mine has an expiration date for the ice now. I can feel it ticking with every throb behind my eyes.
So I’ll go back to France, back to the offer my friend made.
A new team. A new purpose. A softer ending.
Marcy deserves more than a man who can’t promise her forever. She deserves someone who isn’t half-broken. Who doesn’t have to choose between pain and passion. Who won’t one day struggle to say her name when the pain becomes too much.
I stare up at the ceiling, tears stinging.
Maybe I’ll send her flowers. A letter to explain. A poem. Something French. A goodbye worthy of the woman she is.
I’ll write to her that I was homesick, that the offer was too good to pass up and I had to leave immediately.
Because if I look her in the eyes again, I won’t go.
And I have to go.
The photograph that I found in the basement of the house peeks out from the side of my bag. I pull it out and look again at the large extended family, and at the couple on the top step. There’s no doubt in my mind now that this is Victor MacDonald, and I feel a sudden urge to get this back into the hands of his family. I can’t go back to France and keep this. It doesn’t belong with me, it belongs with the town, with the family who started it all.
After the sun rises and a reasonable hour strikes, I dress in the nearest set of clothes and head out, the photograph tucked into an envelope for safe-keeping.
I know most people here would recoil at the idea of me seeking out Jeremy Hunt, Alexander MacDonald’s representative,but that’s the only way I can think of to be sure this photograph gets to its rightful owner. There’s only one place I can imagine a man like Jeremy Hunt staying: The Regent’s Hotel.
The Regent’s Hotel rises in front of me like something from an old novel—one of those grand American estates that wanted to be Versailles but landed closer to art deco Gatsby instead.
