“That’s great.” I smile. “And yeah…Kate’s hot. And smart. And…” I sigh. “Hopefully forgiving.”
“I hope so too, for your sake,” Josh says.
Easton rubs his mouth. “I have a good feeling about it.”
“Wait. How do you know Kate?”
Their eyes go shifty. “We don’t,” Josh says.
“We may have talked to her,” Easton adds.
“What?”
“She’s worried about you.” Easton gives me a ballsack-shriveling look.
Shit. Of course she is. “She called you?”
“Yeah.”
My jaw drops. “Holy shit. Why?”
“Like I said, she’s worried about you.”
“That’s why you’re here?” I cannot believe this.
“Well, we heard that rumor. So we tracked you down to convince you to accept it. But…seems like you already made up your mind.”
“After breakfast I’m checking out.” I hold up my phone. “I was just trying to book a flight to New York.”
“Well, fuck me.” Easton regards me with disappointment. “We came all this way for nothing? Also, you’re supposed to be in Calgary, asshole.”
“I was. Then I wanted to come here.” I pause. “You went to Calgary?”
“Yeah. Your mom told us you were here.”
I shake my head. “Jesus Christ.”
I’m so goddamn confused.
My breakfast arrives. I look between Josh and Easton. “Uh…”
Easton waves a hand. “Go ahead and eat. We grabbed something on the way here.”
I pick up a fork to dig into my eggs. “I still don’t understand what’s going on.”
“We need to talk,” Josh says.
“We do?” I take a bite of sourdough toast. This makes me nervous. “About what?”
But weirdly…I’m not panicking.
“About why you disappeared off the face of the earth nine years ago.”
22
Hunter
I chew some eggs slowly. I guess this is it. I have to tell these guys. They’re going to know how screwed up I am. When they went through the exact same thing and bounced back fine. I sigh. “Okay.”
“Finish your breakfast. We can go somewhere else.”
“The beach,” I say. “We can walk on the beach.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“I’ve never been to Vancouver Island,” Easton says.
“Me either.” Josh looks out the big windows. “It’s pretty awesome.”
My stomach isn’t as receptive to food as it was when I sat down here, but I shove in the rest of my bacon and eggs. I can’t waste bacon.
I sign the check charging the meal to my room and we head outside. Today, the pale gray clouds hang low in the sky, obscuring the blue and the sun. The air feels damp against my skin, but it’s not cold. I lead the way down the path to the beach where the ocean is calm, shifting in shades of silver and smoke, topped with whitecaps.
“Nicer when the sun is out,” I comment.
“Still great, though,” Josh says, staring out at the vast expanse of water.
We start walking along the firm, damp sand near the edge of the ocean.
“So.” Easton speaks first. “Where do we start?”
“I don’t know.” I’m honest.
“I’ll start,” Josh says, surprising me.
I glance sideways at him. “Okay.”
“When I got traded to the Bears, I thought it was the worst thing that could happen to me.”
Relatable. I stay silent, waiting for him to go on.
“I was nice and settled in Dallas. I’ve had a hard time coping with change since the accident.”
He doesn’t have to say more about the accident. We all know what he’s referring to.
“Getting traded was a nightmare. New city, new team, new coach. And Millsy was there. We tried to ignore each other, and it started impacting our play.”
“Shit,” I mutter, kicking a small, smooth rock. Sounds like they haven’t been close, either.
“Yeah. Our coach had to get involved. He’s a good guy, if you’re wondering. Fair. Smart.”
“Good to know.”
“We still couldn’t get our shit together,” Easton says. “It was my fault, too. I wasn’t thrilled when Hellsy showed up on the team. It reminded me of how pissed off I was that my two best friends disappeared out of my life just when I needed them most.”
Guilt and astonishment slam a fist into my gut, nearly knocking the wind out of me.
“My dad and my brother died in the accident,” he continues in a low voice. “I held my brother as he died. I kept telling him Dad would find us.”
Easton’s dad was our coach and his older brother played for the Warriors too.
Memories flash before my eyes, now. The darkness. The cold. The crunch and scream of metal, followed by utter stillness. Then the cries of my teammates. I saw Easton sitting in the snow in the ditch, holding his brother.
I saw guys thrown from the bus, lying in the snow. I saw our bus driver slumped over the steering wheel. I saw Cole walking in circles, crying.
I wait for the dizziness to come, the racing heart and shallow breaths. That’s what happens when I have these flashbacks.
My heart is beating faster, but…I’m okay. I pull in a slow, deep breath.
“I had a concussion,” Josh says, taking over again. “And a bunch of broken bones. I don’t remember much about what happened that night. They took me to one hospital, then another, then I ended up in Winnipeg where my family is.”
“I had funerals to arrange,” Easton says. “My mom couldn’t do anything. She collapsed and…she’s never been the same since. I had to look after her and take care of everything.”
Christ. “I didn’t know that,” I say, my voice scratchy.
“Neither did I,” Josh says. “None of us were very good at communicating back then.”
“Or now,” Easton says wryly. “Getting better at it though. So, I was pissed that you were missing, and that Josh hadn’t even called.”
“And I was pissed that nobody called me,” Josh adds. “I was in the hospital and then rehab for months. I didn’t know if I’d be able to play hockey again.”
A sharp ache stabs through my chest, thinking about Josh lying in a hospital bed dealing with that.
“I got drafted in June that year,” Easton says. “I just focused on hockey. It was all I had. I had to get drafted. I had to make the team. It was selfish, but I was trying to survive.”
I nod. “I get it.”
“I felt like I’d been deserted,” Josh says quietly. “I didn’t think about what Millsy was going through.”
“And I never knew Hellsy felt that way,” Easton says. “I kind of felt like I’d been abandoned. We, uh, sat down one day and talked things out. I apologized. I did desert him.”
“You were working on your own shit,” Josh says. “Which I didn’t know about. And I’m sorry about that, too.”