ログインAllie POV Clara had slept on the couch with her boots on and the lamp burning, which is how you sleep when you have decided to leave quickly, and at nine on Saturday morning I stood in the kitchen doorway with a coffee in each hand and the growing, unpleasant suspicion that I had been a terrible friend for about a week. I had noticed the pieces without putting them together, the way you notice a pot boiling over in another room. She had said fine eleven times on Thursday, which is ten more than a person who is fine. She had stopped humming. She flinched when the radiator knocked, a small whole-body shudder like a horse that has heard a branch break, and when I asked about Carter she answered in tidy, evenly spaced sentences, like someone reading from a card. She had not asked me one thing about Shawn, which, considering that I had spent three days working out how to tell her I'd said no and meant it, was either a miracle or a very bad sign. I had been busy, is what I'm saying. I ha
POV: Carter Sitting in the red seat in row 3 column 102 was an older man wearing a large fleecy vest as he ate salted peanuts out of his cardboard tray and threw the shells between his boots during the whole of the first period. I found my eyes drifting to that exact spot every time I made a rotation. It was something I couldn’t help, I found my natural instinct to check my edges as I circled around our net. Tilt my helmet up to look at the lower bowl to see if the dark hair, big briar hoodie and calm nature of the girl would be there. Her hands always folded neatly over her knees. But it was empty. Which hit me like a blind side check from a 6ft 4 enforcer. My feet felt heavy like they were stuck to the ice as if the zamboni had created a huge amount of wet slush. On the other bench Marcus Drake was sat in the bright white and red away jerseys of the Redwood team. His left hand was planted flat on the boards as he leant forward. He looked like he wasn’t someone who had hi
Clara's POV By the time I rounded the corner of the east concourse, mopping, these two radio nerds were arguing about a man's shoulders and I couldn't really do anything. It was Tuesday night and just after 11 o'clock. It was very quiet and dark in the building except for the long strip of yellow light spilling across the press table. Two sophomores were putting up microphones for this Saturday's radio show. They both had the same Briar Radio hoodie on so I knew who they were. They both were very familiar to me like most people who work late in this building. I could tell who they were by the trash they left from their sneakers. The tall one had a habit of drinking oat milk and left empty cardboard cups in the cup holder. The other one, who wore glasses, had a habit of eating sunflower seeds and left an impeccable pile of shells. They were practicing their introduction for before the game and they were both acting like they were famous. "That's fine, but we have to do the Redwoo
Viktor’s POV The post had been up for eleven days when I finally let myself read the comments. I do this at 5:40, before the eggs. I have eaten the whites of three eggs and a half cup of blueberries at 5:55 every morning for thirty-one years, and I read the news in the same order, and I read my son's life last, on a tablet at the end of the table, in the way a man examines a bill he already knows he will not enjoy. Fake fiancée, real liar? 👀 Four thousand likes. A girl in my son's coat, shoes in her hand, her chin turned a few degrees toward the glass as though she had felt someone watching. The comments beneath it were what comments are: a dozen jokes about the locker room, a Pilates instructor who had left a heart, a boy with a hockey avatar who wrote respect under a photograph he hadn't been invited to take. The word fake sat above it all like a small, bright coin. I turned the tablet over and finished my eggs. Then I counted the ice in my second cup of coffee, a habit from
Allie POV Shawn asked me again at eleven on Saturday morning, in the same booth at Little Wren with the same oat milk latte, and I had my answer ready in my teeth like a nut I'd been cracking all week. I had brought the frog mug in my tote bag, wrapped in a dish towel, and I set it on the table between us before he could finish his sentence and slid it across the wood with one finger. "It's yours," I said. "I know it's mine, technically, but it's been yours since you borrowed it with the face of a man who meant to bring it back. I'd like you to keep it. No." He looked at the mug and then at me. "No to the mug, or no to the other thing?" "All of the above." "Okay," Shawn said, and let out a breath that was almost a laugh. He drummed two fingers on the table, the pattern I knew, and then stopped, as though he had remembered he was no longer allowed to. "Can I ask why?" "Because you want closure." "Is that bad?" "Closure is what people ask for when they want to be forgiven witho
Carter's POV At 3:04 on Saturday morning I was sitting on the third stair from the top with a hockey stick across my knees, waiting for a man I was almost certain I was wrong about. It was the fifth night. Brody had taped a baby monitor to the smoke detector on Tuesday, which was his idea and therefore both unnecessary and the only plan we had, and the receiver sat on the step beside me, a pink plastic duck with a row of green lights that flickered whenever the house breathed. I had learned the landing the way a goalie learns a net. The third floorboard creaked. The fifth, the one outside Dean's door, groaned like a dying goose. The smoke detector chirped every forty seconds, and I had stopped hearing it around Wednesday, which in hindsight was a mistake, because I almost missed the click of the back door. I held still. Footsteps in the kitchen, careful, weighted toward the heels, the walk of someone carrying his shoes. The hinge of the pantry door. The long, slow creak of the cel







