The darkness swallows me whole, and for once, I don’t fight it.
thirty-one
MAINE
I shouldn’t be here.
O’Neil’s feels like a movie set of my old life, all the familiar pieces in place but none of them real. The sticky floor, the crack of pool balls from the back tables, the neon beer signs casting their gaudy glow over everything—it all belongs to a version of me who doesn’t exist anymore.
That guy, the one who stood on chairs and orchestrated drinking contests, who turned every gathering into his personal circus, feels like someone I read about in a book once, a campus legend they’ll multiply ten times and be talking about for years to come.
Long after I’m gone.
The last week has blurred into a single, endless nightmare of beeping monitors and fluorescent lights that never turn off. Chloe’s blood oxygen readings are branded into my brain—eighty-eight, eighty-nine, eighty-seven, back to eighty-eight—numbers that dance behind my eyelids every time I blink.
Yet here I am, beer bottle on the table, untouched for the twenty minutes I’ve been sitting here. Mike and the guys staged what they called an intervention, physically dragging me out ofthe hospital room where I’d been sitting, waiting for the news that my sister was getting better or?—
I can’t finish that thought.
“You need to get out,” Mike had said, his tone leaving no room for argument. “Just one beer. One hour. The hospital will call if anything changes.”
I was going to refuse, but my parents had told me to go. So here I am, while my mind stays trapped in that ICU room, thinking of the little girl who’s struggling to breathe. The new medication isn’t working, and the inflammation in her lungs isn’t responding.
The doctors use words like “considering other options” and “monitoring closely,” which seems to be medical speak for “we don’t know what the fuck to do.” But it’s for that reason that I want to be there, holding up my sister and my parents, because at least then I know what to do.
It’s the one thing I still feel confident about.
Not hockey.
Not Maya.
Not my financial future, that’s for fucking sure.
So one beer, then I’m gone.
Doesn’t mean that one beer can’t be excruciating, though, as the bar noise washes over me in waves—laughter that feels obscene, music that grates, and the cheerful clink of glasses that makes me want to scream. I’m drowning in the normalcy of it all while my sister fights to breathe forty miles away.
Mike’s voice cuts through the fog. “You haven’t touched your beer.”
I force myself to take a performative sip. “I should go back,” I say.
“You being there, exhausted and wrecked, doesn’t help her.”
I know he’s right, but logic doesn’t apply when your baby sister—the one you taught to tie her shoes, the one who used tocrawl into your bed during thunderstorms—is lying in a hospital bed looking smaller than she ever has before.
The guilt is a physical thing, sitting on my chest like a weight. Not just about Chloe, though that’s the sharpest edge of it. It’s everything I’m not telling the guys around this table. They—and Coach—think I’m just worried about my sister, and that’s why my hockey has gone to shit.
Coach even gave me a fortnight off.
A blessed break from the public eye and, maybe, a chance to salvage my career.
Because nothing says “NHL prospect” like melting down in front of scouts.
But they don’t know about everything else. The empty refrigerator at home, the second job I had to take to send money to my parents for medical bills, the crushing weight of trying to be everything to everyone while slowly disappearing myself. And they sure as hell don’t know about Maya.
Maya.
Her name is a bruise I keep pressing, unable to stop even though it hurts.