What if she gets weekends? What if Harper has to go to a woman who showed up high on my doorstep, and I have to pretend that's okay?
What if they give her Harper entirely?
The thought is physical. It knocks the air clean out of me, like taking a hit into the boards, except there's no ice to skate itoff on, no whistle to blow, just me and the ceiling and the specific terror of a thought I can't finish.
I can do the math on my own failure. I've done it a hundred times. My parents, who found it easier to love me from a distance. Emma, whom I hurt without meaning to, who has more grace than I deserve. Chase, who went down on the ice because of me. Jessica, whom I spent one night with and never followed up on, who got pregnant with our daughter and never told me. All of it adds up to a pattern that looks like this: Tyler West ruins people.
And now Harper.
What if I ruin this, too?
What if a judge looks at my life, a professional hockey player, rarely home, living with the woman he fell in love with, who started as his nanny, and decides that's not a stable home? What if the instability is me? What if I'm the problem? What if the best thing for Harper is?—
The thought cuts off there because I can't finish it.
I get up. I can't stay in that room with those thoughts.
Downstairs is dark except for the glow of the new security camera monitor I installed. I've been checking it compulsively, waiting for Jessica's car to appear on the feed, braced for her to come back.
I sit on the couch and put my head in my hands.
I'm going to lose her.
The certainty of it settles over me like something physical, and I can't breathe past it. Can't find the logical counter-argument I've been constructing all week. Can't hear Ms. Chen's voice saying sixty-forty or Nora's voice saying we have the evidence, and months of proof.
I can only hear the old voice, the one that sounds like too many years of being the problem, saying,you always ruin what you love.
"Ty?"
Nora's voice in the doorway. I look up.
She's in the oversized t-shirt she wears to sleep, her hair loose. She takes one look at me, and she knows. She always knows.
She crosses the room and drops to her knees in front of me.
"What's happening?"
I try to say nothing. I try to say I'm fine. The words don't come.
What comes out instead is, "I'm going to lose her."
And then everything that's been building breaks loose, and I tell her everything. The truth beneath the custody fear. The pattern. The year in Ridgeport, eating protein bars in parking lots, believing I deserved to be invisible because that's what you get when you're a fuck-up.
And then, finally, the thing under all of it.
"There was a dinner," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Years back in Hartford with Chase and Emma. A bunch of us went out. Me, them, Donny, Jackson, and Maya.”
She doesn't say anything.
"Maya had left her job—left Pinewood entirely—and nobody knew why. She'd lost weight and shown up in Hartford out of nowhere and wouldn't say what had happened, and I… I decided I was going to be the one who got it out of her. I pushed her at the table, and then I cornered her outside the restaurant after. She kept telling me to stop, telling me to back off, and I kept pushing because in my head I wastrying to help."
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
"And then I grabbed her arm. To stop her from walking away. And she… God, Nora, she went somewhere else. Her face. I'll never not see her face. Whatever had happened to her, she was right back inside it, and I'd put her there, standing on a sidewalk in front of my friends. Jackson saw it before I did. He pulled me off her and dropped me with one punch, and I deserved it. I deserved worse than that, and I knew it, and yet I still didn't go to her. I just sat on the concrete bleeding and told myself it wasn't that bad."
My hands won't stay still.
"She wouldn't speak to me after that. Wouldn't be in the same room. Jackson made it clear in about six different ways that I was done. And I was angry about it. Can you believe that? I was angry thathewouldn't forgivemefor whatI'ddone to her. I told myself it was an overreaction. I told myself I hadn'tmeantit. And I carried that anger around with me for months."