Page 95 of The Beautiful Collision
“Was it the night of the fight?” I ask, recalling his distraction at O’Neil’s and the way he’d looked hollowed out even before Rook’s announcement shattered everything. “He told me she was sick when we were… having our discussion… but I didn’t give him time to give me specifics.”
“Two days before,” Sophie confirms. “He’d just gotten back from the hospital when…”
Her voice trails off, and we sit in silence for a moment. I don’t have the energy to lead off the next phase of conversation, sooverwhelmed by grief and now an added sadness for Chloe, but I can feel Sophie building up to something. She’s choosing her words carefully, like she’s defusing a bomb.
“Yes, he fucked up monumentally,” she finally says. “But Maya… you saw him with his sister. You saw him on the floor of your kitchen.” She pauses, and her next words are gentle but devastating. “So I want you to ask yourself a question: was that man a fake?”
The question hangs in the air between us.
Impossible to answer and impossible to ignore.
I want to say yes. It would be easier if I could paint him entirely in black, make him the villain of this story. But I can’t. Because I saw him. Not the performer, not the player, but him. The exhausted man counting pennies. The terrified brother. The guy who couldn’t say he needed me but whose eyes begged for it anyway.
“I don’t know,” I whisper, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve said in days. “I don’t know what was real.”
Sophie squeezes my hand. “Maybe it all was. Maybe he started playing a game and ended up playing himself. Maybe the bet became meaningless the second he actually got to know you, but he was in so deep he couldn’t get out, and was too proud to admit it or ask for help.”
“Or maybe he’s just that good of an actor.”
“Do you really believe that?”
I want to.
God, I want to believe he’s just a master manipulator.
Because then I could hate him cleanly, purely, without all these complications.
But I keep coming back to moments that felt too raw to be performed. All the moments we’d cared for each other, in ways big and small. And the way he looked at me that last nightwe were together, when I told him I needed him, like I was something precious he didn’t deserve.
“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” I admit.
Sophie doesn’t push further than that, which I’m glad about. She just holds my hand while I sit there in his jersey, under his sister’s blanket, surrounded by the ghost of something that might have been real or might have been the cruelest illusion of my life.
And now I’m just lost, holding onto fragments of Maine Hamilton and trying to figure out if any of them were true.
thirty-five
MAINE
The locker room smells wrong.
That’s my first thought as I stand here, waiting for everyone to file in. It still reeks of the usual suspects—stale sweat, that menthol muscle cream Schmidt uses by the gallon, the faint undertone of mildew that no amount of industrial cleaning can ever quite eliminate—but there’s no energy to it.
No life.
Usually this place vibrates with barely contained chaos, but right now it’s as dead as my hockey career feels. And it’s my fault, because inadvertently, my absence from the team and the aftereffects of the bet have thrown a bomb into the middle of the team, and are threatening to derail both the season and careers.
So I sent the group text message an hour ago:
Team meeting. One hour. Locker room. Important.
No jokes. No emojis. Just those words that felt like swallowing glass to type.
I’ve done a lot of soul-searching over the few days since Mike confronted me in his living room, forcing me to open up about what’s been going on, and make a plan for fighting my way back. Because, while it’s OK not to be OK, he’s right that it only matters if you work out of it.
But the guys have heeded the call.
Now they’re all here.
