“Your playlist is sad.”
“It’s not sad. Isla helped me with it.”
“It’s giving divorced dad staring at a lake.”
“I am a dad. I’m just not divorced,” I reminded him.
“And not getting laid,” he repeated.
“Max, I get enough from everyone else. You don’t understand what it’s like to be a single dad. Isla is my life. I can’t bring a woman into our lives and risk her getting hurt if it doesn’t work out.”
“I think it’s you that’s scared, but you have to get over it at some point,” he said, and he wasn’t wrong.
“Isla asked me to find her a mom,” I confessed.
“Damn, that breaks my heart. I remember when my biological dad took off and didn’t look back. That shit messed with my head. If it wasn’t for my dad now, I don’t know where I would be. See, my mom took a chance on Ryse, he didn’t disappoint, I got a dad and my sisters. They may be driving me crazy now that they’re teenagers, but I love them. Things got lonely when it was just Mom and me.”
I shook my head. “Way to lay it on thick.”
“You’ve been alone long enough,” he said.
“You’re only four years younger than me. You should be settling down too. All those threesomes and puck bunnies must be getting old,” I said to him.
“Nah, I’m good,” Max said.
I gave him a sidelong look. “Sure you are.”
“I am,” he insisted. “I like my life.”
“You like chaos.”
“Same thing.” He shrugged.
I laughed because for Max, it kind of was. He leaned back in the passenger seat, one arm resting on the door, looking way too relaxed for a guy who had just given me an emotional lecture about not dying alone.
“Anyway,” he said, changing the subject before I could chirp him harder, “how long has it been since you’ve seen Leo?”
“Easter.”
“Damn. I still picture the triplets as those annoying kids running around family parties and stealing dessert off everyone’s plates.”
“They’re twenty-two now.”
“Don’t say that. It makes me feel ancient.”
“You’re twenty-nine.”
“Exactly. Ancient.”
I pulled into the arena lot and flashed my badge at security. I cut the engine and grabbed my phone from the cupholder. The arena had that offseason-preseason smell when we walked in. Cold air. Rubber floors. Equipment. Coffee. The kind of place that felt half asleep and fully alive at the same time. Staff were already moving around the halls, and the testing area had been set up with tables, laptops, medical equipment, clipboards, and a few stations for the new guys coming in.
This part of the year always felt strange. Not the grind yet, but not summer either. The organization started waking up. Guys came in for physicals and baseline concussion testing. Training staff checked old injuries. Doctors asked questions players lied about. Rookies pretended they weren’t nervous. Veterans pretended we weren’t watching everything. I had barely stepped through the doors when I saw Leo. He was standing near one of the intake tables, filling something out ona clipboard. He had gotten bigger since I saw him at Easter, which was annoying because I still remembered him as the troublemaker triplet. He had Nils’s build, tall and strong, but Sierra’s softer eyes.
Max stopped beside me. “Holy shit.”
Leo looked up. For half a second, he stared at Max like he was trying to place him. Then his face broke into a grin.
“McGuire?”