Chapter 25: What Ottawa Left Behind

Marcus Webb arrived on a Tuesday with a two-hour airport layover and zero advance notice, which was his exact personal style. His text read: Layover. Two hours. Feed me. I met him at a diner near the terminal, one of those places with fluorescent lighting and reliably good eggs, and he was already settled into a corner booth when I pushed through the door, looking completely like himself. Broad through the shoulders, unhurried in everything, the kind of man who filled a space without needing to announce his presence inside it. A coffee sat in front of him and he was reading something on his phone with the ease of someone who had never learned to feel rushed by anything or anyone.

He looked up when I came in and smiled. "You look better."

"You said that on the phone."

"Still true." He set his phone face-down on the table. "Sit. Tell me things."

I sat. I ordered eggs I didn't particularly want. Then I told him things, the way you told things to someone who already understood the complete shape of your life and only needed the most recent chapters filled in. He listened the way Marcus always listened, completely and without interrupting, asking a question only when the story genuinely required one to keep moving forward.

When I reached the part about the parking lot, about the kiss that had nothing punishing inside it, he set down his fork and gave me his full attention.

"That's different," he said.

"From what I told you before."

"From everything you've ever told me, since the day I've known you." He studied my face carefully. "You're not pulling back from it."

"I told you on the phone. I'm frightened."

"You were frightened then and you're something else now." He tilted his head. "You look like a man who has already made a decision and is living inside the decision. There's a settled quality to you that wasn't there before."

Outside the window, planes crossed the gray sky on their assigned paths, each one steady and purposeful in the low clouds.

"He told me about your call," I said. "That you rang him."

Marcus picked up his fork again, entirely unbothered. "I did."

"You could have asked me before you did that."

"I could have. I asked him instead." He ate for a moment. "He answered straight. No managing the conversation, no performance of any kind. I respected it."

"What exactly did he say? He gave me the outline but not the actual words."

Marcus considered. "He said he was still working out the answer. To what his intentions were toward you." A pause. "And he said he had spent years being certain about everything, and that being uncertain about you was the first time uncertainty had felt like the right and correct response to something."

I sat with that for a while. The eggs arrived and I ate without much attention paid to them.

"He's not simple," Marcus said carefully.

"I know that."

"He held something over you that one person should never hold over another. Whatever good thing is developing right now, the beginning of it was wrong. You're allowed to keep both those things true simultaneously."

"I do keep both," I said. "I'm not pretending it started clean. I'm saying what it has become is worth something separate from where it came from."

"I believe you." He held my gaze across the table. "I just want you to be careful about the distance between who someone is and who you need them to be. Sometimes that gap becomes completely invisible when you're standing too close to it."

"He intercepted a medical flag on my file with the league," I said. "Without telling me. Without expecting anything back for doing it."

A long pause. Marcus set his coffee cup down carefully. "Okay," he said slowly. "That is different from what I was picturing."

"Yeah."

"Still. Be careful with the parts of yourself that have been locked away for a long time. Don't throw every door open just because the hallway finally feels safe to walk through."

"I'm not throwing anything open," I said. "I'm just not boarding everything shut anymore. There's a real difference between a wall that protects you and a wall that traps you, and I've been confusing the two for about fourteen years now."

He was quiet for a moment, and then he smiled, the full genuine one that reached all the way to his eyes. "Good. That's exactly the right way to think about it."

"You drove four hours once to talk me back into hockey," I said.

"And I would do it again without any hesitation. Though the food here is considerably better than wherever we sat that night." He checked his watch and began calculating the time against the departure board. "Take care of yourself. Call me when things get complicated."

"When, not if?"

"When. You matter to people now, Leo. Mattering always complicates things eventually. That's not a warning, that's a fact about what good lives look like from the inside."

He left cash on the table for both of us and walked out toward his gate. I stayed in the booth with cold eggs and the specific warmth of having been seen clearly by someone who had known you long enough to do it without a single judgment attached to the seeing. I thought about what he had said. Both things true at the same time. The beginning was wrong. What was happening now might be worth something real and lasting.

I paid and drove to practice. Jax was already on the ice when I arrived. He looked up when I stepped out onto the surface, and his face did the new thing it had been doing lately, that small opening before the professional steadiness settled back into place. We ran the morning drills without comment. At the water break he handed me a bottle without looking, knowing I had forgotten mine, and I took it and said nothing and he said nothing and we went back to the ice. Both truths held steady between them, not canceling each other out, not requiring any resolution. The morning was exactly enough and I let it be.