Nora's hand finds my knee and stays there.
"Game one of the Stanley Cup Final. Pinewood Bears against the Ridgeport Wolves. We're up by one with two minutes to go, and they pull their goalie. The play stops for an icing call, and I look across the ice, and there he is, just jumped on for the faceoff. Thirty feet away with his back to me."
I make myself say it.
"I decided right there and then that I wasn't going to take the puck, I wasn't going to play the shift, I was going to put him through the boards, for what he'd done to me at that restaurant. For all of it. The puck dropped, and I skated full speed, head down, and I hit him from behind while he had his back turned. It was a dirty hit. The kind that ends careers. He went down and didn't get up, and I lined up to hit him again while he was lying there."
I'm shaking.
"Chase wasn't even supposed to be near it… he was nowhere near that play. But he saw what I was doing, and he threw himself between Jackson and me. He shoved me in the chest with both hands and called me a coward. I dropped my gloves, and so did he, and we fought. On the ice. In Game One of the Stanley Cup Final, with Jackson lying unconscious six feet away from us. We dropped gloves like a couple of fucking children."
She's not moving. I'm not looking at her. I'm staring at the rug.
"Chase's helmet came off in the scrum. It just came off. The Wolves enforcer was skating in to break it up, to getChase off me, nothing more than that. But he was coming in hot, and he didn't see that Chase's helmet was gone, and Chase had his back to him too, and he couldn't stop in time."
I close my eyes.
"He hit Chase clean, and he went sideways, and his head—his unprotected head—came down on the ice. I heard it. I heard it over a sold-out arena. Emma heard it from the stands. Chase didn't get up. They got him off on a stretcher. He was in a coma, Nora. For weeks."
I scrub a hand over my face.
"He woke up. He came back. He's whole. He's Chase. And Jackson recovered, too, as it wasn’t actually that bad. But both of them came back from what I did, and the worst part… the part I can't put down is that they forgave me, which is generous in a way I cannot comprehend.”
I finally look at her.
"And every single one of them looking me in the face and telling me they were okay was worse than if they'd never spoken to me again, because they were better people than me, and I didn't know how to live in a place where everyone was being kind to me about something I'd done. So I asked to be traded, and I came here, and I told myself if I just kept moving, eventually I'd outrun it."
The room is very quiet.
"And now I'm here," I say, my voice wrecked, "this person who ruins things. And I have a daughter who deserves better, and you, and I'm so scared that I'm going to lose both of you the same way I've lost everything because I don't—" I stop. "I don't know how to not be the thing that happens to people."
I'm crying. Not the quiet kind. The kind I've been holding back for months, maybe years.
Nora's hands are on my face.
"Listen to me," she says. Fiercely. Completely certain. "You are not going to lose us. Either of us."
"You don't know?—"
"I know I'm here. I know I love you. I know I love Harper. And I know I'm not going anywhere." Her thumbs wipe at my tears, and they keep coming. "Tyler. Look at me."
I meet her eyes.
"You're not the thing that happens to people," she says. "You're a man who, with no warning, got dropped into fatherhood with zero preparation. Who learned every single day because he refused to give up on his daughter. You're the man who shows up. Who takes time off practice for doctor's appointments and learns to read every cry, knows which position she likes when she's colicky, and narrates hockey statistics to a baby for twenty minutes because he wants to share the thing he loves with her."
My throat is too tight to reply.
“The things you did… They were real. But Tyler. You've been serving a sentence you gave yourself, and I need you to hear me when I tell you that everyone forgave you. I know."
"How do you?—"
"I heard you. On Thanksgiving night, I was awake on the sleeping bags, and the kitchen wall is thin, and I heard most of what Emma said to you. About the man she knows. About forgiving yourself."
I stare at her.
"You knew. The whole time."
"I knew." Her thumb keeps wiping at my face. "I knew the shape of it. I didn't know the full details. I didn't tell you because you weren't ready to tell me, and that wasn't my decision to make. But I've known since then. And nothing in what she said made me love you less. If anything, it made me love you more."