“Yeah, I’ve got a rental house lined up. It just wasn’t quite ready before we left on this trip. I’ll move in this week.”
“I’ll bet that’s a relief.” Amy wrinkled her nose. “That hotel isn’t bad, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
“Because we already live in hotels for a good chunk of the year,” Tori muttered.
She wasn’t wrong about that. Anyone involved in hockey got used to spending a lot of time in hotels.
I just hadn’t anticipated spending extra time inthishotel. Especially when there was someone I wanted to meet back on the West Coast.
And when someone I wanted was in this same hotel.
I wasn’t going to finish my food, so I finally gave up, told Tori and Amy that I was going to go check on our flights and our injured player, and got up. As I was busing my dishes, I glanced without thinking toward a table.
Toward that table.
Towardhistable.
Devon caught my eye. For about a second, our gazes locked, but before I could read everything that flickered across his face, he broke eye contact. He focused on something one of the guys at his table was saying, though he didn’t seem to be that dialed into the conversation.
As I was heading out of the banquet hall, we glanced each other’s way again.
And again, I couldn’t read everything that registered on his face, only that it made the guilt burn hotter. Was I imagining things? Projecting?
Irrationally certain that talking to Sanjay—never mind meeting him—was a betrayal somehow?
God, nothing made sense. I needed to get out of here. Notjust out of the banquet hall, but out of this hotel. This city. This state.
I wanted to get home so I could breathe. So I could meet Sanjay.
So maybe I couldfinallylet go of Devon.
CHAPTER 16
DEVON
I grew up in Toronto. I understoodlake-effect snow.
Now, Toronto rarely got walloped as hard as Buffalo. Well, except for the winter of ’98 when Toronto had to call in the army to clear the snow. They’d run out of places to put it.
I didn’t remember that year, of course. But Mom told me about it. Reminiscing that she’d been stuck for nearly five days in the house where she’d been rooming. She’d gone stir-crazy.
The urge to ask her if she’d known my father back then had been strong, but I hadn’t. The look of hurt that crossed her face anytime I mentioned him had me, once I was old enough to understand, never saying his name again. I’d thought, when she was dying, that she might bring him up.
She never did.
After she died, when I hit my teen years, I wondered if she even knew who he was. I’d never known her to be promiscuous, but then I was a kid and had no way of knowing for certain. Maybe she’d slept around before she got pregnant and decided after I was born that she was done with that. God knew I’dnever met any men in her life. If she had any lovers, she kept them far away from me.
She would’ve been too busy. Keeping a roof over our heads. Keeping me in hockey equipment.
As I lay on my hotel bed, trying not to think about Jack one floor above and two rooms over, I assured myself I wasn’t obsessed.
What are you up to? How’s the snow in Toronto?
Mickey
Check the fucking weather app. I’m busy.
Doing what?