Page 100 of Canadian Boyfriend

“You think?” I was startled by the timbre of my own voice. It was hard. Merciless. I couldn’t make myself care. To think I hadweptin front of this woman. I had shown hereverything. “And when was that?”

“I knew for sure when you were growing out your beard during postseason. We talked about your having come to the Twin Cities for Erik’s game.” She was speaking quietly and her voice was shaking, but she was looking me straight in the eye. “But to be honest, that only confirmed it. I had my suspicions from the start.”

I had to make a conscious effort not to double over. The lie revealed by the letters was a deep cut, but hearing that Aurora, who I’d always thought was so immune to my hockey fame, had known who I was from day one was a knife turning in the wound.

Suddenly I was running a lot of things through this filter. Her resistance to talking about the charm bracelet when I asked her about it. Her sudden migraine when I’d wanted her to meet Erik. “There wereso manytimes you could have brought this up.”

She maintained eye contact, but at least she had the decency to look ashamed.

“I liked you because I thought youdidn’tcare about hockey.” That’s how she’d slipped through. “Because youdidn’tknow who I was.” I crossed my arms over my chest. I felt like I was having a heart attack.

“Idon’tcare about hockey,” she said quietly. “Yes, I invented a hockey player. But really I invented a loving, attentive boyfriend. The hockey was incidental. But somehow, you don’t, orcan’t, believe that anyone could care about you the person versus you the hockey player. Sarah slipped through because she didn’t know who you were when you met. I slipped through, too.”

I was a little taken aback by her choice of words.Slipped through.That was the phrase I’d just used in my head.

“I slipped through, until I didn’t—until you read those letters. Until you found out I’ve been lying to you.”

I was further taken aback by how easily she said that.Until you found out I’ve been lying to you.I’d come out swinging, planning to accuse her of just that. But here she was, easily admitting to it like it was no big deal.

“I did a shitty thing by not telling you,” she went on. “But it was because I was afraid of losing you. I’m not trying to gloss over the ‘lying,’ but—”

“Why am I hearing air quotes there?” I said, not caring that I was interrupting. “Are you trying to tell me there hasn’t been any lying?” Because I might be a bit befuddled, set back on my heels, but I hadn’t entirely lost my grip on reality.

“No, I’m trying to tell you that we’re muddling two issues here. We’re getting tripped up on the first one, when really what we need to do is consider them together.”

“So what’s the ‘second issue’?” I made my own air quotes, and I couldn’t hide the derision in my tone. I didn’twantto hide it.

“The second issue is that I love you. Not some hockey player I met in passing as a teenager. Not an NHL player.You.”

Oh my God. My head was going to explode. I couldn’t process all this.

“I’ve come to realize this year that I’ve always been afraid of losing people,” she said, and I suddenly wished she wouldstop talking. Actively not wanting to hear Aurora talk was not a state I’d ever imagined myself being in, but here we were. “Instead of being honest with people, I’ve spent my life twisting myself into what I thought they wanted me to be. And where did that get me? Sick. It got me sick.”

I couldn’t argue with that, but I didn’t see how that changed anything to do with us.

“So we’ve had these three interludes,” she continued. “Christmas, spring break, camping. Each time we’ve… fallen deeper. Then we stop. We pretend it isn’t happening. But itishappening. It’s happening in parallel to so-called regular life. I feel like you think that if whatever’s between us stays on that parallel track, it’s OK. But the parallel track is an illusion. I mean, look at us. We have sex. We date. I know you’re going to object and say we don’t date, but wedo. We go to dances and arcades together. We go camping. We have fun. Over here.” She gestured to one side of her body. “And we have sex. Over here.” She gestured to the other side. “I was OK with that initially—hell, I was OK with it until very recently, like until a couple days ago. And I know you’re going to say that I’m the one who started things while we were camping, which is fair, but—”

“Will you stop saying you know what I’m going to say?” I said, belatedly realizing that I sounded exactly like Olivia when she was being a brat. Who said blood was thicker than water?

She held her hands up, stopped talking as if ceding me the floor. This was what I wanted, right? For her to stop talking? So why couldn’t I make my mouth work?

“Something happened to me under those lights,” she went on when it became clear I wasn’t going to take my turn to speak. “I don’t know how to explain it other than that it felt like I suddenly became the person I wanted to be. I realized Icould have everything I wanted as long as it was whatIwanted. Not what my mom, or a boyfriend, or a ballet teacher wanted. Like Dorothy and her ruby slippers finding out she’s had the power to get home all along. I’ve spent my whole life straining toward something without being able to really articulate what it is, only that I can never quite get there. But that night, I realized that it wasn’t a thing I was straining toward, it was a person. The person I’ve been straining toward is me.

“But then reality kicked in on the way home. That didn’t make my realization any less powerful, but it did mean it was going to take work to make my life the way I want it to be. Work, and honesty.

“I understood that we were going to come home and you were going to make a speech and push me away. I’m sorry to the extent that I’ve muddled things by jumping you at the campsite, but this back-and-forth, on-and-off is not going to work for me anymore. What has been my big lesson of the past year? That it’s OK to want things. It’s OK to ask for what I want. And I want you, for real.”

What the hell? She thought I was going to be fine with this big betrayal and now we were moving on to the let’s-be-boyfriend-girlfriend stage of the conversation?

“When you said, that one time, that you didn’t want things to get leaky, what did that mean exactly?” she asked when I remained mute.

“It meant I didn’t want Olivia to see us kissing.” I could speak, it turned out, when all I had to do was answer a factual question.

“Why didn’t you want Olivia to see us kissing?”

“Because I can’t bring someone into Olivia’s life so soon.” She knew this. This was Life After Widowhood 101.

“I’m already in Olivia’s life.”

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