“Fuck, Kelsey. How could you do it? Why?”
“Because I’ve been here this whole time,” she sniffs. “Right here, waiting for you to realize what you could have if you would just take it. Waiting for you to come home and have the life we’re supposed to. You coaching hockey. Me, cheering you on.”
Wade’s eyes meet mine. We’re both seeing it. The dinner with his family. Her shock that he might not come back to Enderson after the NHL. I text his parents. She loves them, and until today I’d have bet my life she would never hurt anyone in their family. But now I don’t know.
She lets out a short laugh. “Instead, you choose someone who doesn’t understand you. Who would rather hide you from her family than stand proud beside you. I thought… maybe it was time for you to have a lesson in disappointment.”
Grace’s text comes back in seconds. Kelsey’s not at the house. Her car is gone. Bill’s calling the police.
“Where are you?” Wade asks, eyes bleak.
“The courthouse. I sent the files from work. I didn’t think about it when I did it. But I heard Bill asking about tracing the emails… They’re going to go back to my terminal.”
“Jesus.”
It’s quiet for a moment, then she has to go. Her boss is there, and she’s going to tell him what she’s done.
When we update Pete and the lawyers, they think she’s looking at fines more than jail time. She’ll lose her job.
But Wade and I both know, the price that will be the hardest for her to pay will be losing his family.
I ask if Wade wants a minute to talk to his parents alone, but he pulls me into his side, holding me close as we call. Grace is a mess and Bill is quiet. They blame themselves, but Wade assures them it’s not their fault. That he was the one who hadn’t been honest enough about the situation with Kelsey.
And when I take his hand and quietly tell him I’m sure… he explains the rest. About us. How it started. Where we are now. That he loves me.
And when Grace says she loves me too, I start crying again.
Wade
It’s been a fucked-up couple of days. But Harlow and I held each other through them and we’re coming out the other side stronger. Together.
And now we’re figuring out what life is going to look like going forward.
Spoiler: It’s looking good.
Harlow’s phone is the one blowing up these days. She’s gotten a ton of offers already, and the headhunters keep coming. But she’s taking her time and weighing her choices. Letting the PHR competition wine and dine her.
She’s kind of delighted by the whole thing and, man, nothing’s better than seeing that smile.
Pete was able to hang on to the endorsement. And to celebrate, we decided to move in together. Harlow’s the one who brought it up, but I’d been thinking about it since the night we got back from Enderson. So it didn’t take much dirty talking to get me on board.
The guys are giving me relentless shit. Not about Harlow—they love her. But about the whole “be the bunny” business. Needless to say, Axel has been running his mouth. I can’t wait for the day he meets the right girl and I get to pay him back with interest.
Hell, what am I thinking? This guy’s a contender for the Lifetime Player Award. He’ll never settle down.
Besides, “Be the bunny” got me Harlow.
So life is good. I love Harlow. My family loves Harlow. And my friends love her too. Now I just need to get my girl to love hockey.
Epilogue
Harlow
One Month Later
“Grace, I can’t believe you did this!” I’m parked on our living room sofa with Grace on speaker, the contents of the care package she sent spread out on the coffee table before me. Wade’s working out and won’t be home for a few hours, but this package was addressed to me and me alone. And I couldn’t wait!
There’s an assortment of flavored teas, a tiny vial of glitter that’s sealed with a sticker that has Wade’s name on it with a giant X through it. There’s a tin of homemade cookies and a leather-bound book that made me cry when I opened it.
She started a scrapbook for us.
And Wade must have known, because there’s a crazy bad picture that has to be from his phone, taken from the night at the club. There are receipts from all the gas stations we stopped at on the way to Enderson and then picture after picture—some I didn’t even realize had been taken—of us with his family and us with his friends. Of us starting something real.
It took me several tissues to get past that one. But then she asked if I’d seen what else she sent. And sure enough, there was more.
“Cheat sheets?” I ask, laughing at the binder she compiled with the Slayers team roster and a short dossier on each of the players with the information she found most interesting about them.
Spoiler: It’s not their stats. And Grace noticed the same thing about Boomer’s little sister, Piper, and Bowie that I did.
“I know how you like to study up on everything. And seeing as how you’re an official hockey girlfriend, I thought this might be a good way to start.”
There’s a list of hockey terminology. Websites for gossip and news. Pictures of Wade on every team he’s played with—including football—with his numbers and stats. Team rivalries and traded players.
All in clear plastic page protectors that make me love this woman even more than I thought I could.
“Go to the back,” she tells me, excitement in her voice.
I flip through and find several more pages with burned CDs tucked into sleeves and labeled with pictures of Wade dressed in his hockey gear.
“Are these his games?”
“In order. As many as we had from all the way back to Mites. He was so cute. I snuck a couple of his old football games in there too. He was spectacular.”
When we hang up, I dig around to find something to play them on and then put the first one in.
I don’t even know how many hours I’ve been sitting here, but I’m perched on the edge of the couch, my hands clutched in front of me, breath held, riveted to the last seconds of a game played six years ago. Wade’s doing the impossible… on skates. He takes the puck off his opponent’s stick. Passes it through the other guy’s legs to himself.
And then he’s blazing up the ice, feinting right and then cutting left, his stick a blur of motion. There’s no time left. He fires off a shot and—
“Score,” comes a low, familiar rumble at my ear, scaring the life and a totally humiliating yelp out me.
I’m off the couch in a flash, hand at my throat, eyes wide and shifting between the flesh-and-blood man in front of me and the miniature version of him pumping his fist hard as he glides on one skate into the embrace of a team that has spilled onto the ice following the final buzzer.
I’m mesmerized by both. In awe.
Wade grins down at the table. “Mom’s package came.”
He flips through the pages and shoots me a cocky, too-sexy grin. “Been watching my old games?”
Three of them. One from this past season with the Slayers, an AHL game, and this one from college. “You’re really good.”