All Chapters of WHY CHOOSE?: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Amber showed up in a jacket over pajamas, her dark hair loose, smelling like sleep and something floral. She smiled when I opened the door and I felt — something. Warmth, maybe. The genuine kind. "Couldn't sleep?" she said. "No." "Me neither." She stepped inside, already familiar with the layout, and I closed the door behind her. This was easy, I reminded myself. This was what easy felt like. We didn't talk much. We never did, which was part of why this worked. She kissed me first, her hands on my face, and I kissed her back and waited for my brain to go quiet the way it usually did when I had something physical to focus on. My brain did not go quiet. I was present. I was technically, functionally present — my hands knew what to do, my body knew what to do, years of muscle memory carrying me through the motions while something behind my eyes stayed very still and very separate, watching like a stranger through a window. She made a soft sound against my neck and I tightened my g

The meeting lasted eleven minutes.I knew because I counted. Watched the clock on the wall behind Assistant GM Patrick Reeves's head tick through every single one of them while he talked at me in that particular corporate register that's designed to sound reasonable while delivering something that isn't.Unprofessional conduct.He said it twice. Both times with the same careful neutrality, like the words were a scalpel he was trying not to press too hard."Someone filed a complaint," he said. "I want to be transparent with you about that, Nadia. We value transparency here.""What kind of complaint?""Conduct unbecoming of a medical professional. Inappropriate relationships with players." He paused. "Nothing specific. No names, no incidents. Just a — concern, raised through the appropriate channels."I kept my face completely still. I'd gotten good at that in my marriage — the particular skill of presenting a smooth surface while everything underneath was moving fast."I see," I said.

LUKEI knew something was wrong the moment I saw her.She was doing that thing with her clipboard — holding it slightly higher than she needed to, her pen moving in those precise, controlled strokes that meant she was using the task as a container for something she didn't want to spill. Three weeks of watching Nadia Torres and I already knew her tells the way I knew my own skating stride. The slight lift of her chin when she was managing something. The way her eyes tracked a little too carefully, landing on faces and then moving on before anyone could read anything into it.She was fine. She was performing fine.Something had happened.I ran drills for twenty minutes after practice trying to work out the fury.The ice helped. It always helped — the cold and the speed and the singular focus of blade against surface, the way the rest of the world went quiet when you were moving fast enough. I ran the same sequence over and over until my lungs were screaming and my thighs were burning an

Not the way I'd kissed him before — those times had been urgent and desperate, the release valve of too much pressure building too long. This was different. Slow. Deliberate. My hands on his face, tilting him up, learning the specific weight of his jaw in my palms. Finn made a sound against my mouth that moved through me like a current. His hands found my waist. Pulled me closer. I went — no resistance, no calculation, just forward — and felt him breathe out against my lips like he'd been holding something and had finally let it go. I walked him backward. He went easy, trusting, his hands sliding up under my jacket, finding the hem of my shirt. I sat him down on the couch and stood over him and looked at him in the lamp light — flushed, breathing hard, his dark hair falling across his forehead — and felt something in my chest open so wide it almost hurt. "Tell me what you want," I said. Finn looked up at me. His hands were still fisted in the front of my shirt, holding on.

"He was also lying," Finn added conversationally. "In case you were tracking the pattern."I looked back at the ice. The rookies had given up on the drill and were now just trying not to fall down. I watched them without seeing them, processing the information Finn had just handed me — Luke, this morning, in Finn's apartment, because that's where he'd been. The looseness. The ease.The confirmation of what I already knew."He's okay, though," Finn said. Quieter now. No performance in it, just the plain thing. "We both are."I stood there at the boards with the cold coming up off the ice and the arena echoing around me and felt something move through my chest."Good," I said.One word. Completely inadequate for what I meant.Because I meant it. That was the part that cracked something open in me — the fact that I wasn't performing the sentiment, wasn't saying the thing you're supposed to say. I actually, genuinely, from somewhere below my sternum, meant it.I wanted them to be okay.I