Discover Top Posts Tagged with #nhl x reader

willing and able IV | s. crosby

"i've been having a hard time adjusting i had the shiniest wheels, now they're rusting"

warnings: language.

summary: the aftermath and hope

request: yes

song: this is me trying - taylor swift

word count: 14.1k

a/n: well that last part was not the last part anyway a promise is a promise and ive been trying to keep my promises lately so here you go :))))

previous part | part one

—

The thing about being held after years of not being held was that your body forgot how to let go. It didn't know how to go back to the kitchen table and the cold coffee like the whole world hadn't just come apart and put itself back together wrong in the middle of your apartment. Your body kept refeeling it over and over. Sidney's arms around you, too tight and then careful, like he was afraid of both. His mouth at your temple. The smell of him that you'd have known blind in a crowded room. The way his voice cracked around the word baby.

Baby.

My girl.

I've got you.

You didn't believe it. Not all the way. You weren't stupid enough to hand your whole heart back to a man just because he'd looked at you with those wrecked eyes and said the things you used to lie awake wanting to hear back when you were eighteen and sick every morning and scared every night. But some part of you wanted to. Some teenage part of you had crawled straight out of the box you'd buried her in years ago, dirt still under her fingernails, hair a matted mess, heart still parked on a porch somewhere in Cole Harbour. She'd heard his voice and lifted her head, and that was the worst part. That she was still in there at all.

Sid left after the light in the room turned from gray to gold.

Your father came to the doorway first. One knock and Sidney stepped back from you so fast it was like he'd been caught with his hand somewhere he wasn't allowed. You hated that. Hated that he looked ashamed to be standing close to you, like holding you was a privilege he expected to be billed for later. Hated more that you understood exactly why. Your dad stood with one hand braced on the frame, his jaw set into the same hard line it had worn for four years any time Sidney's name got too close to the family.

“Time,” your dad said. One word. It didn't need more.

Sidney nodded fast. “Yeah. Yeah, of course.”

Your dad's eyes cut to you, just checking, the way they'd checked on you a thousand times since Beau was born, like he was permanently checking on you. You gave him the smallest nod you could manage. Sidney saw it happen and his whole body relaxed, like your nod had given him permission to leave without it counting as leaving again. Still, he looked back at you on his way to the door, and the words sat in the air between you, unsaid.

Don't disappear.

He didn't say it. You didn't either.

He stopped by the shoe mat before he reached for the door. Beau's dinosaur rain boots were tipped over next to your sneakers, one on its side like he'd kicked out of them mid-adventure and run straight into the rest of his life without looking back. Sidney looked at them one second too long.

“He likes those,” you said, because the silence had gotten too loud.

Sidney looked back at you.

“The boots.” You felt stupid the second it left your mouth. “He wears them even when it's not raining.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Says they make him faster.”

Your dad tipped his head back and studied the ceiling like he was asking God for the patience to survive this conversation, but his mouth had gone soft at the corners despite himself. He loved Beau so much it had ruined him a little. It had ruined all of you. Beau had come into the world years ago and dragged love out of places that had gone cold and locked in the months before him.

“That's good,” Sidney said, and his voice barely made it out whole.

It wasn't good. It wasn't bad. It was a fact about a little boy Sidney had never gotten to hold. A pair of dinosaur boots by a door in an apartment he'd never been inside of until an hour ago. It was three years of daycare drop-offs and puddle jumping and bedtime stories, all of it flattened down into one sentence he had to be handed like a gift he didn't know how to open.

He put his hand on the doorknob, then looked at you one more time.

“I won't just show up,” he said, low. “I know this was already a lot. I won't come here unless you tell me it's okay.”

You nodded.

“And I won't call unless you say it's okay.”

You nodded again, even though it sat wrong in your heart. You'd spent four years wishing for one phone call that never came, and now the idea of one scared you more than the silence ever had.

He took a breath like it hurt going in. “But I want to. When you're ready. Even if it's just to talk about Beau. Or not Beau. Or anything. Whatever you can give me, I'll take it.”

Your dad shifted his weight in the hallway, and Sidney straightened like a hand had landed on his shoulder and reminded him he wasn't allowed to stay.

“I know,” you said.

He looked at your face like he was searching it for permission to finally walk away from it. “Okay.”

Then the hallway swallowed him, and your father followed, and the door clicked shut softly behind them both. You stood there with your arms wrapped around yourself, listening to their footsteps go down the stairs. One heavy, one slow. The building settled back into its usual small sounds around you and for a while you didn't move at all.

Then Beau's voice came down the hall, small and thick with sleep.

“Mama?”

Your body moved before your mind could tell you to. It always did now; there was no part of you left that didn't turn toward that sound. You dragged both hands down your face hard enough to sting and found him sitting up in his little bed, hair sticking up in six directions, one cheek printed red from the pillow. His blue blanket was balled in one fist against his chest. His eyes were barely open, heavy and confused, but they were already looking for you. Always looking for you first.

“Hey, bug,” you whispered.

He held his arms up, and you crossed the room and sat on the edge of the mattress, and he climbed into your lap with the total trust of a kid who had never once in his life doubted he'd be caught. He was warm from sleep, heavier than you remembered, getting almost too big to climb onto you like this. His legs sprawled over yours, though one foot hung off the edge of the bed and his face pressed into your neck.

“You're warm,” you murmured into his hair.

“I’m sleepy.”

“I can tell.”

He shifted, one arm looping your neck, his other hand finding the collar of your shirt and closing around it. He'd done that since he was a baby. Not always to comfort himself. Sometimes, you thought, to make sure you stayed put.

You just held him for a minute. Sid was gone. Your dad was probably downstairs walking him to his car, or standing on the sidewalk looking like he wanted to say something and deciding against it. Your mom was probably in the passenger seat with tears drying tight on her cheeks, hands folded in her lap, not trusting herself to look back at the building. And you were here, on the edge of your son's bed, under the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck slightly crooked to his ceiling because your dad had let Beau help put them up.

The world could split wide open, apparently, and your son's room stayed exactly the same. Stuffed animals dropped where they fell. A plastic hockey stick leaning against his dresser. Books stacked in a pile that was bound to fall any day now. A sticker on the baseboard because Beau had decided that it needed to live there. His pajama drawer hanging open where he'd tried to pick his own pajamas the night before and thrown half of them onto the rug before landing on the shirt with the rocket ships.

Beau stirred against your shoulder. "Mama?”

"Yeah, baby?"

"I heard talking."

Your eyes opened. He lifted his head just far enough to look at you, cheek still creased, mouth caught in that particular pout that made strangers stop mid-sentence in grocery store lines.

You smoothed his hair back off his forehead. "Is that what woke you up?"

He nodded, slow and very serious. "Voices."

"Yeah," you said softly. "I'm sorry, baby. I didn't mean to wake you up."

"You okay?"

He'd asked you that before. In grocery stores. In the kitchen. In the backseat any time you'd gone quiet for too long for his liking. He was three years old and he already knew your tells better than most adults did.

You smiled, and it wobbled halfway through. "I'm okay."

He studied you with the terrifying focus only small children have. "You got water eyes."

A laugh came out of you, small and cracked. You wiped under one eye with your thumb. "Yeah. I do."

"Why?"

Because my dad drove the boy I loved to my door at sunrise. Because the man who should've known you from the second you took your first breath stood in my living room and held me like he'd found something he thought was dead and buried. Because I kissed him. Because I still love him, which feels like a crime I keep committing against myself. Because I don't know how to tell you that your dad isn't an absence anymore, he's a person, and I don't know yet if that's going to heal you or break something in you that hasn't broken yet. Because I wanted him here and I wanted him gone and now he's gone and I already miss him, which makes me feel like the world's biggest idiot.

You kissed his forehead instead.

"Grown-up stuff," you said.

Beau made a face like you'd told him the sky was made of vegetables. "Boring."

"Very boring."

He accepted it, because he was three, and grown-up stuff lived in the same category as bills and work and waiting rooms. Your feelings, thankfully, could still be filed there too, as long as you said it gently enough and didn't let your voice shake on the way out. He yawned wide enough that his jaw cracked, then dropped his head back to your shoulder.

"Did Nana and Papa come?"

You pulled in a slow breath. "Nana and Papa were here, yeah. They didn't come upstairs, though."

"Who did?"

Your fingers went still in his hair. You looked down at your son, at the curve of his cheek, the thick lashes drooping half shut over his eyes, the boy who had spent his whole short life asking questions you'd learned to answer with careful, loving half-truths.

Who's my dad? It's just you and me, buddy. Do I have one? Everybody has one, baby. Where is he? Not here.

You could keep doing that. You could protect him for one more day, one more week, one more month, and tell yourself waiting was the safe thing. But Sidney had been standing in your living room less than an hour ago, crying over a life he hadn't known he'd lost.

You ran a slow hand down his back.

"We had a visitor this morning," you said.

He lifted his head. "A visitor?"

"Yeah."

"For me?"

"Not exactly."

"For you?"

"Yeah," you said. Your mouth had gone dry. "For me."

Beau blinked at you, waking up in pieces, his little brain trying to work through what you were saying. "Was it Marcy?"

You had to smile, because he knew exactly four adults who came to this apartment. Your parents. Marcy from the salon. And the mailman, who Beau believed was personally, magically responsible for the stickers that showed up in your mailbox.

"No, not Marcy."

"The mail guy?"

"No, baby."

"Did he bring stickers?"

"No stickers."

Beau sighed like this was a genuine tragedy. "Bad visitor."

A laugh cracked out of you, wrecked but real. "No. He wasn't a bad visitor."

"Who?"

You looked at his face. Your son was your whole heart walking around outside your body, but he was also Sidney's face, softened by baby fat that hadn't fully melted off yet. Sidney's intensity, shrunk down small and dressed in dinosaur pajamas. You tucked the blanket higher around his shoulders even though he didn't need it, just to give your hands something to do.

"He was someone very important to me," you said.

Beau's eyes went wide. "Important like Nana?"

"Different important."

"Like Papa?"

"Different than Papa too."

He took some time to think about it. His world was small but it was full and important people in it were the ones who picked him up when he fell, fed him, fixed his broken toys, listened to stories that went nowhere and made no sense. Important people weren't abstract to him. They were hands and voices and snacks and someone at the door when he woke up scared.

"Your friend?" Beau asked.

Friend. What a tiny word for what Sidney had been. What a merciful one too.

You nodded slowly. "Yeah."

"Good friend?"

You brushed your knuckles over his warm cheek. "My very best friend."

He accepted that because he had a best friend at daycare named Ollie, though the title changed depending on who'd shared blocks with him that week. Best friends mattered. Best friends were allowed to visit.

"What's his name?"

Your heart went suddenly, stupidly loud in your own ears. You'd said Sidney's name a thousand ways across your life. Laughing into a phone at sixteen. Moaning it into a dark room at seventeen. Sobbing it into a pillow at eighteen. Whispering it by accident to your own son when his face looked too much like his father's and grief made you careless. You'd spat Crosby like a curse. Said Sidney cold as ice. Said Sid only in dreams you didn't tell anyone about.

Now you were going to say it to Beau.

"His name is Sid."

Beau blinked.

"Sid," he repeated.

It came out of him sweet and unburdened. Just a name, three letters, sitting in your son's sleepy mouth like it weighed nothing at all.

You nearly came apart right there on the edge of his bed.

"Yeah," you whispered. "Sid."

He nodded and dropped his head back to your shoulder, satisfied, like that had answered everything he needed answered for now. "Sid's a small name."

You laughed, wet and surprised. "I guess it is."

"Like Beau."

"Yeah. Like Beau."

He rubbed his face against your shirt. "Can I have pancakes?"

The whiplash of motherhood never stopped being insane. One second you were standing at the edge of a fault line that had swallowed four years of your life, and the next your son wanted breakfast, and both things were equally important.

"Yeah," you said, voice thick with something that was half laugh and half sob. "You can have pancakes."

"With chocolate?"

"No."

"With gummy bears?"

"Absolutely not."

"With sprinkles?"

You hesitated one second too long.

"It's lazy day."

You stared at him. "Who told you that."

"You."

"Traitor."

His grin was Sidney's grin. God help you, it was Sidney's exact grin, dropped whole onto a three year old's face. "Sprinkles?"

You sighed. "Fine. A few sprinkles."

"Lots."

"A few."

"Lots few."

You poked his side and he shrieked with laughter, squirming in your lap, suddenly loud and bright and completely alive in the way only Beau ever managed to be first thing in the morning. You carried him into the kitchen even though he could walk on his own, because he asked, and because you needed the weight of him against your hip more than he needed the ride. He hung off you like a koala the whole way. You made pancakes one-handed while he perched on your side and supervised.

"More milk."

"No, chef."

"More egg."

"We already put the egg in, chef."

"More."

"We're not making egg soup, chef."

"Chocolate chips?"

"No, chef."

"Sprinkles?"

"After, chef."

"Now?"

"Beau."

He grinned and pressed a sticky palm flat against your cheek. "Mama."

"Don't Mama me."

"Mamaaaa."

You closed your eyes. "You're lucky you're cute."

"I'm handsome."

You tense up. It was such a small thing to level you. He said it sometimes, because your mom said it, because strangers said it, because old women in grocery stores bent down and called him a handsome little man while he hid behind your legs and grinned around his thumb. It shouldn't have mattered. You looked down at him. He blinked back up at you, completely unaware he'd just pressed his thumb straight into a bruise you didn't know you still had.

"Yeah," you said softly. "You are."

He nodded, matter of fact. "Papa says."

"Papa's right."

You finished the pancakes. Beau spilled sprinkles across the floor and you pretended to be furious about it, and he helped you pick them up one at a time, eating two before you caught him doing it. Cartoons ran at a volume of twenty-three in the living room, a number Beau had settled on months ago and refused to negotiate. The sun moved slow across the kitchen floor. You drank coffee that had gone bad from being reheated twice and forgotten about both times.

Every few minutes your eyes went to the door anyway. Sidney wasn't coming back today. He'd said he wouldn't. He had to let you breathe. He had to let you be Beau's mother a while longer before he started asking, with just his eyes, whether he could be Beau's father too. Still. You looked.

By ten, Beau was fully dressed in jeans and a hockey shirt your dad had bought him while insisting he did not, as a rule, support hockey as a concept. No team logo. Your dad had limits, apparently, even when it came to spoiling his grandson. Beau had dragged his little plastic net into the living room and was taking dramatic shots on an invisible crowd, narrating the whole thing to himself at top volume.

"He skates, he skates, he shoots, he scores! The crowd goes ahhhh!"

"That's screaming, not cheering," you called from the table.

"Same thing!"

"Not really."

"Mama, watch."

"I'm watching."

"No, watch with your eyes."

You widened your eyes at him dramatically. "These?"

He dissolved into giggles. "Yes."

He took another shot. The foam puck ricocheted off the couch leg, went sideways, and landed square in the laundry basket.

"Score!"

"That was nowhere near the net."

"It's trick hockey."

"Oh. My mistake."

~

At noon, your parents came back.

You heard them before you heard the knock, because Beau heard keys jingling and shouted "Papa!" and abandoned his stick mid-shot, socked feet skidding across the floor as he ran for the door. You stood too fast, wiping your palms down your jeans, suddenly aware you'd done nothing with your face all morning, hadn't fixed your hair, hadn't hidden the fact that you'd spent the last few hours walking around your own apartment with your heart hanging on by a thread outside your body. Your dad let himself in with his key, because he had exactly zero respect for the concept of knocking when his grandson was screaming for him from the other side of a door.

"There he is," your dad said, voice booming warm as Beau crashed into his legs. "There's my guy."

"I have a game," Beau announced. "Moosey is goalie."

"Is he any good?"

"No."

Your dad nodded, gravely serious. "Tough break for Moosey."

"He doesn't move."

"Lazy goalie."

Beau gasped like he'd been personally offended on Moosey's behalf. "Papa!"

Your dad scooped him up with an exaggerated groan, like Beau weighed twice what he actually did. "Good Lord, did you get bigger since breakfast?"

"Yes."

"What have you been eating? Rocks?"

"Pancakes."

"Rock pancakes?"

"Sprinkle pancakes."

Your dad looked at you over Beau's shoulder, one eyebrow climbing.

You shrugged. "Lazy day."

His mouth twitched. "I see."

Your mom came in behind him slower. Her eyes found yours first, careful and so full of feeling you nearly had to look away from it.

"Hi, sweetheart."

"Hi, Mom."

Just two words. Nothing special about them. But your voice cracked on the second one, and her whole face changed. Your dad must have heard it too, because he hitched Beau higher on his hip and bounced him once.

"Come on, bud. Show me this Moosey goalie situation. I need to scout the talent."

"He's bad," Beau said again.

"We'll work with him. Every goalie deserves a chance."

"Even bad ones?"

"Especially the bad ones."

Beau considered this but didn’t seem full convinced. "Can we make him good?"

"We can try."

Your dad carried him into the living room, making a big production of nearly tripping over the hockey stick, the blanket, the small toy mountain Beau had somehow assembled in under an hour.

Your mom watched them go, then turned back to you.

"You look pale," she said.

"Thanks."

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah."

You wiped your damp palms on a dish towel and sat down at the kitchen table before she could ask, because you were tired of standing, because your legs had that watery, unreliable feeling they used to get when you were pregnant and had cried too hard for too long. Your mom sat across from you. For a few seconds, neither of you said anything at all.

Out in the living room, your dad made an exaggerated buzzer sound.

"Oh, big save by Moosey!"

"No, Papa! Moosey let it in!"

"Then why'd you put him in net?"

"Because he's the goalie!"

Your dad let out a loud sigh. "Management has questions."

Your mouth twitched, but the smile didn't hold.

Your mom reached across the table and covered your hand with hers. "Talk to me."

And just like that you were eighteen again. Standing in your parents' living room with your hands shaking and your whole future disappearing before your eyes, saying I'm pregnant and waiting for the floor to open up so you wouldn't have to watch their faces fall. You were twenty-two now. A mother. A working adult who paid rent and remembered which day was recycling and could get a screaming toddler dressed for daycare in under four minutes flat. Someone who had survived the thing she once thought would kill her. But the second your mom said talk to me, you wanted to put your head in her lap and sob until there was nothing left inside you to sob with.

"I don't know what to do," you said.

Her fingers tightened around yours. "I know."

"No, Mom." Your voice broke on it immediately. "I really don't know. I don't know what's right. I don't know what's safe. I don't know if letting him in is the smartest thing I've ever done or the dumbest. I don't know if I'm protecting Beau or hurting him by keeping all of this away from him. I don't know."

Your mom listened like she had all the time in the world to give you, even with dishes stacked in the sink and laundry piled in the hall and Beau shrieking with laughter in the next room.

You pressed your free hand hard against your forehead.

"What if all I do is hurt him more?"

"Beau?"

"Yes, Beau. Who else."

Your mom's eyes followed the sound of him.

From the living room, your dad's play by play carried through the rooms. "And Beau's got the puck, he's flying down the ice, Moosey is panicking, the crowd is going insane."

"I'm fast!" Beau shouted.

"So fast!"

Something in you cracked a little wider.

Your mom looked back at you. "Sweetheart. Look at him."

"I am."

"No. Look at him, and then tell me where."

You couldn't. You couldn't, because Beau was joy given legs and a voice. Beau was loud and loved and sticky-fingered and bossy about goaltending. Beau believed with his whole chest that a pair of dinosaur rain boots made him faster. Beau made your dad crawl around on the floor and your mom buy more pajamas than any child needed and you put sprinkles on pancakes because he'd invented a national holiday called lazy day. Your mom's thumb moved slow over your knuckles. He was loved. God, he was so loved, by you, by your parents, by every daycare worker who let him talk about hockey until he tired himself out, by coworkers who sent home cookies shaped like hearts because they adored him. He had toys and routines and fishing trips with Papa and a mother who would tear the world apart with her bare hands before she let it touch him.

He wasn't unloved. He wasn't unwanted. He wasn't broken.

Your silence answered for you anyway.

Your mom's thumb kept moving. "He's been loved every single day of his three wonderful years. Every day."

You blinked hard, and it did nothing.

"And he'll be loved as long as the three of us are breathing," she said. "You already know that."

"Mom."

"No. Listen to me. If Sidney is serious, if he really means to be in Beau’s life for the right reasons, what harm is one more person's love?"

Your throat closed so tight it hurt to talk. "It can be a lot of harm if that person leaves."

"I know."

"No, you don't." It came out sharper than you meant it to. "Sorry. I just, you don't know what it felt like to read those texts. You don't know what it felt like to sit there and understand that he knew, and he still didn't want us."

Her eyes went glassy. "You're right. I don't."

"And now he says he never sent them." You laughed a bitter sound. "And he looked, God, Mom, he looked destroyed. He looked like someone had thrown him into traffic. He looked like he was telling the truth."

Your mom didn't answer right away.

You looked at her, desperate now, chasing something you needed. "Do you think he was?"

She hesitated. The hesitation scared you worse than any answer could have.

"Mom."

She took a slow breath. "What do you think?"

Your pulled your hand out from under hers.

"No." Your voice trembled. "No, I need you to just tell me. I need someone to tell me, because I can't risk it again. I can't be wrong about him twice. I can't let myself believe him and then find out I was stupid all over again."

"You weren't stupid."

"I was." Your eyes burned. "I loved him so much and I thought that meant he'd love me back enough to stay. And then I had Beau, and I couldn't even love him right at first because I was too angry and too sad and too scared, and now Sidney's standing in my kitchen telling me it wasn't him, and I just have to figure out what to do with that?"

Your mother stood up so fast her chair scraped the floor. You clapped a hand over your mouth, but it was already too late. The sound had already gotten out. Small and wounded and awful, a sound you hadn't made out loud in years.

"Oh, baby," she said.

Then she was pulling you up out of the chair and into her arms, and you went. You hated how easily you went. You hated how badly you'd needed it. You weren't a teenager anymore. You had a whole child of your own. You'd spent years telling yourself you didn't need to be anybody's baby anymore, because being someone's baby hadn't saved you the last time it mattered.

But your mother held you, and you fell into her the way you had at eighteen with your stomach turning and your phone dead silent on the nightstand. The way you had when Beau was two weeks old and screaming and you thought maybe you were defective somehow because you couldn't get him to stop. The way you had on your nineteenth birthday, blowing out candles over a cake you didn't have the heart to make a wish on.

"I can't do it wrong," you sobbed. "I can't do it wrong with Beau."

"You won't."

"I might."

"You might make mistakes," she said, her hand moving in slow circles over your back. "That's different."

"I don't want him hurt."

"I know."

"I don't want him confused."

"I know."

"I don't want him to think he wasn't enough. I don't want him thinking he was missing something his whole life just because he didn't have a dad."

"He won't."

"You don't know that."

"No," she said quietly. "I don't. But I know you. And I know that little boy. And he knows he's loved. That much I know for certain."

You cried harder. Your mom didn't hush you, didn't tell you to calm down, didn't do anything but hold on while you came apart in the kitchen and your father kept Beau laughing louder than usual in the next room, probably because he could hear enough to know you needed the cover. That made you cry harder too. Everything made you cry today.

"I wanted Sidney to know him," you admitted, the words tearing loose. "That's the worst part. Even when I hated him, I wanted him to know his own son. Every time Beau did something that looked exactly like him, that stupid little scowl, that grin, I wanted to tell Sid. I wanted to send him pictures. I wanted to say, look, look what we made, look how perfect he turned out."

Your mom's hand stopped for a second against your back, then kept moving.

"And I wanted Beau to know him," you said. "I wanted him to have that. I wanted him to know where his face came from, where all that goddamn stubbornness came from. I wanted him to know his dad didn't leave because he wasn't good enough. And now maybe he didn't leave at all, and somehow that makes it worse."

She pulled back just far enough to look at you. "Why?"

"Because then it was all for nothing."

Her eyes filled.

You wiped angrily at your own face. "All that pain. All those nights alone. Beau's first steps, his first word, his first Christmas, Sid missed all of it, and I spent years telling myself it was because he didn't care. But if he did care, if he would've been there, then somebody stole that from him. From us. From Beau."

Your mother's lips pressed into a thin line.

"So what am I supposed to do with that," you whispered. "What the hell am I supposed to do with that?"

She smoothed your hair back the way she used to when you were small. "You grieve it."

You shook your head. "I don't want to."

"I know."

"I already grieved him once."

"I know."

"I don't want to do it again."

"You're not grieving him this time," she said softly. "You're grieving the years."

The years. The pregnancy without him. The birth without him. Beau's first birthday cupcake, mashed into frosting on his own fat cheeks, babbling mama with nobody else's name to fill in the blank. Beau learning to walk. Beau learning to skate. Beau asking, with his whole clear-eyed trust, if he had a dad, and you handing him scraps of an answer because the truth was too mean to give a three year old. You'd survived every bit of it because you thought there'd never been another choice. Now it turned out there had been one all along. It just hadn't been offered to either of you.

"I don't know how to tell Beau," you said.

"You don't have to tell him everything right now."

"He deserves the truth."

"He deserves the truth in a way he can actually understand."

You let out a wet, wrecked laugh. "That sounds like it's straight out of one of your parenting books."

"It might be."

"Did you read those for me?"

"I read everything for you."

Your face crumpled all over again.

Her hand found your cheek. "You were my baby. You still are."

"I'm twenty-two."

"And?"

You laughed, miserable and helpless. "And I have a baby."

"That didn't stop you from being mine."

You leaned into her palm before you could stop yourself.

"I need you to tell me what to do," you whispered.

"I can't make this choice for you, honey."

"Mom."

"I know you want me to. I know exactly why." She brushed another tear off your cheek with her thumb. "But this one has to be yours."

"I don't trust myself."

"I do."

"You shouldn't."

She smoothed your hair back again. "Listen to me. None of this is your fault. It isn't Sidney's fault, either, if he truly didn't know. And it is absolutely, one hundred percent not Beau's fault. The fault belongs to the adults who looked at two scared kids and made the choice for them"

You nodded, but it still hurt to take in.

"You can't get those years back," she said. "I wish to God you could. I wish I could hand them to you wrapped up with a bow. I wish I could've put Sidney in that delivery room and given you the life you should've had. But I can't. What you can do is decide what you want the next ones to look like."

"I don't know."

"That's alright."

"What am I even supposed to tell Beau?" you asked. "After three years of no dad, what am I supposed to say? Hey, good news, buddy, turns out there's this whole person who helped make you, and he didn't know, and now he wants in. How do I explain that to a three year old?"

"Slowly."

You gave her a look. "Mom."

"I mean it. Slowly. You don't have to give him the whole adult story, because he doesn't need it. Not yet. You tell him Sid's someone special who wants to know him. You let Sid become a person to him first."

You glanced toward the living room. Beau was sitting on your dad's stomach now, waving Moosey directly in his face.

"Kids are stronger than we give them credit for," your mom said.

Your head snapped up. "I don't want him to have to be strong."

"I know."

"No, I mean it. He shouldn't have to be. He shouldn't have to be strong because a bunch of adults made a mess before he was even born. He should get to be little. He should get to think sprinkles are the most important decision of the day and that thunder happens because clouds are bowling. He shouldn't have to be brave about his dad."

Your mom's eyes filled again.

"I wanted Beau to know Sidney this whole time," you whispered. "And I wanted Sidney to know him. I know I said I hated him. I know I said we were better off. But God, I wanted them to have each other. Every time Beau did something that looked like him I wanted Sid to see it. I wanted him to know. I wanted–" your voice broke clean in half. "I want all those years. I want them so bad it hurts."

Your mom pulled you back in.

From the living room, Beau shouted, "Mama! Moosey got traded!"

Your dad called back, "It's a business decision!"

Despite everything, you laughed.

Your mom smiled, eyes still wet. "Sounds serious."

"Very."

Beau came running into the kitchen, socked feet sliding on the tile, and crashed straight into your legs before looking up and catching your tear-streaked face.

His grin dropped instantly. "Mama?"

You bent to him without thinking twice. "I'm okay."

"You crying."

"I know, baby. Sometimes grown-ups cry."

"Why?"

You glanced at your mom, and she said nothing, gave you nothing but the space to decide. Your choice. Always yours.

You looked back down at your son and pushed his hair off his forehead. "Because I was thinking about something I missed."

He frowned, working it over. "Like camping?"

Your chest hurt, but you managed a smile. "Yeah. Kind of like camping."

He nodded, then shoved Moosey into your arms because it was the best thing he could think to do. "You can hold him."

"Wow. That's generous."

"He got traded."

"To me?"

"Yeah. You need a goalie."

"I absolutely do."

He patted your shoulder like he was consoling a teammate. "Don't cry. Papa's bad at hockey."

Your dad appeared in the doorway behind him. "Papa can still hear slander from three feet away, thank you very much."

Your mom laughed under her breath. You hugged Beau with Moosey crushed sideways between you. You still didn't know what you were going to do. But for the first time all morning, the not knowing didn't feel like drowning.

~

September came.

Time had always been cruel like that, indifferent to whatever was happening during it. It kept moving while you were pregnant. It kept moving while Beau screamed through colic and teething and every bad night in between. It kept moving while Sidney won games and hoisted trophies and turned into the kind of man people said his name about with something like wonder. It kept moving while you learned how to cut hair for a living, how to budget a paycheck down to the dollar, how to bring down a fever at two in the morning, how to answer a three year old's question without your voice breaking in the middle of it.

Now it moved while Sidney flew back to Pittsburgh with no real plan at all.

He left Nova Scotia in the first week of September, and for the first time in his life, going back didn't feel like forward motion. Usually Pittsburgh meant a shift in his body, camp coming, the season coming, structure snapping back into place. The relief of knowing exactly where he fit in the world. Sidney had built his whole life inside schedules. Practice at this hour. Lift after. Media here. Game there. Sleep when the body allowed it. Eat what helped. Repeat until the machine ran itself and the mind followed along because it had no other choice.

But he boarded that plane with his chest hollowed out and his whole life in pieces that didn't fit into any one bag. His passport. His wallet. Two duffels. A carry-on stuffed with clothes he barely remembered folding. Your photo, still tucked behind his driver's license, the edges gone soft now from how many times he'd pulled it out in the last few weeks and just looked at it, like looking hard enough might change something. And a new silence where his family used to sit.

His body got on that plane. His mind stayed behind in Halifax, in your kitchen, with you standing in front of him with tears still wet on your face. In the doorway of Beau's room, where he hadn't let himself go, because he didn't think he'd earned the right to watch his son sleep just because he wanted to. He thought about that a lot. About the doorway he hadn't crossed.

He had a son.

It was the first thing in his head every morning before his eyes were even fully open, and the last thing he thought before whatever counted as sleep finally took him.

He had a son.

And he did not know the first thing about being anyone's father.

He landed in Pittsburgh with the sick, floating feeling of having misplaced his entire life somewhere between the jet bridge and baggage claim. Usually there was someone waiting. His dad, if he was in town. Mario, most years. A team car sometimes. Sometimes someone arranged by someone in Pat's office. There had always been people. Too many people, probably. Now he stood outside arrivals in the warm end-of-summer air and realized that he had zero desire to call any of them.

His phone felt poisonous in his hand anyway. His mother's name sat unanswered in the call log, over and over. His father's, the same. Taylor's too, and that one made his chest hurt worse than the others, because Taylor hadn't done anything to deserve his silence. She was fourteen. She was probably scared and confused and furious at him for disappearing, and he couldn't even blame her for it. She was the same age he'd been when he first started noticing you in a way that made him feel stupid and shy and too big for his own body. Fourteen. Still a kid, even if she'd have rolled her eyes if she heard him say that. But calling her meant risking his mother picking up. Or worse, his father, saying the right thing in exactly the right voice, making Sidney feel eight years old again and desperate for his dad to somehow still be the good guy in this. He couldn't survive that today.

Mario had called twelve times over three weeks. Nathalie, twice. Pat more than either of them, until Pat's calls thinned out and turned into short texts instead.

Call me when you land.

We need to discuss housing.

We need to discuss the media approach.

Sidney, this silence is not productive.

Neither was stealing four years of someone’s life, but apparently productivity had its limits and Pat had reached his fast. Sidney hailed his own cab, an oddly, almost unusually normal thing for him to do. He had money. He had status. He had an entire team of people who would've handled it in ten seconds flat if he'd let them. Instead he climbed into the back of a cab with cracked vinyl seats and a pine tree air freshener spinning slow on the mirror, and when the driver asked where to, he found out he didn't have an answer.

Not Mario's. That was the first thing he was sure of. He loved them. That was the hell of it, that he still loved them, loved Mario, loved Nathalie, loved their kids, loved the family that had opened their home to him at eighteen when he was overwhelmed and homesick and so far from anything he knew. But Mario had known. Mario had known about you. Mario had known about Beau. And Sidney could not stay under his roof with that knowledge.

"Downtown," he said finally.

The driver glanced at him in the mirror, probably recognized him, chose not to make anything of it. "Anywhere specific?"

Sidney closed his eyes. "Just a hotel."

He stayed there four nights. The first, he slept maybe two hours total, lying flat on top of the comforter in his travel clothes, staring at the ceiling while the city moved below the window in sirens and traffic and muffled voices bleeding through the wall.

He thought about Beau's voice. About you crying in your kitchen, telling him you still loved him and hated yourself for it. About your hands closing around his wrists. Your mouth against his. The way you'd said you wanted things to work, like the words had to be dragged out of somewhere deep and unwilling in you.

He replayed all of it until it turned into a kind of torture. Then he replayed it again anyway.

By the second night, he called a realtor whose number he'd had saved since the previous summer, back when buying a place in Pittsburgh had felt like a natural next step for a young captain putting down roots, making the city home in some more permanent way.

She sounded thrilled to hear from him.

He barely heard half of what she said.

"Something private," he said.

"Of course."

"Not too flashy."

"Absolutely."

"Enough space."

"For entertaining?"

He paused.

A kid running down a hallway. A plastic hockey stick banging against a wall. You in a kitchen that belonged partly to him too, someday, if he was lucky enough to be let into that kind of future.

"No," he said, throat tight around it. "Just space."

The realtor went quiet then recovered smoothly. "I can send some options."

"Thanks."

In the meantime, his agency found him an apartment. Not Pat directly, since Sidney still wasn't taking his calls. It came through a junior guy named Dan who sounded genuinely terrified to be involved at all. Sidney didn't blame him. The place was in a new glass tower, polished concrete and neutral furniture picked out by someone who thought grey made luxury, a gym downstairs, underground parking, a concierge who worked hard not to stare and a view of the city that would've impressed him a month ago. Now it just felt like a place where nobody knew him well enough to ask if he'd eaten today. He moved in with what little he'd brought. Socks in a drawer. Suits on a rod. Groceries he mostly didn't touch.

Do not call Y/N because she hasn't given you permission.

Do not call your mother, because you'll either scream or start crying and you don't know which is worse. Do not call your father, because you might say something you can't take back. Do not call Mario. Do not call Pat.

Do not call Y/N.

Baby steps, he kept telling himself. Eat. Skate. Sleep. House hunt. Therapy, maybe.

That last thought scared him. Therapy. Sidney Crosby didn't do therapy. Sidney Crosby handled things. Trained harder. Compartmentalized. Made eye contact with reporters and said the right combination of words. Focused on the next shift, the next game, the next season. But this wasn't a slump. This wasn't bad press. This wasn't the usual pressure he knew how to handle himself. This was you sobbing in his arms about the year it had taken you to feel like Beau's mother. Maybe handling everything alone, the way he'd been taught to, was exactly how they'd all ended up here in the first place.

So he found someone. Not through the team, because that felt too close, too likely to become a line item in some file somewhere. He asked Dan for a private recommendation and hated himself a little for needing anything at all from that office. Dan sent three names, then added: for what it's worth, I'm sorry you're dealing with whatever this is.

Sidney stared at that text for a long time.

Whatever this is.

He typed back, Thanks.

The first therapist he called had no openings. The second did.

His first appointment was on a Tuesday afternoon in a quiet office with green chairs and a plant so aggressively healthy he wanted to feel if it was fake. The therapist was a woman in her fifties with kind eyes that reminded him of yours. He sat on the couch with his hands clasped tight between his knees and gave her the short version, because the long version felt like too much to survive saying out loud twice in one lifetime.

High school girlfriend. Pregnancy. A message intercepted that he never even knew existed. A son who was three years old. A family that knew. A career full of people who knew. Everyone had lied.

She listened without a flicker.

Then she said, "What do you want help with first?"

Sidney stared at her.

First. Like there were categories. Like his whole life had become a menu of emergencies he needed to rank in order.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"That's alright."

He looked down at his own hands. His hands were familiar, hands that had won faceoffs and lifted the Cup over his head and signed a decades worth of autographs and cupped your face like it was the only thing in the world worth being careful with. Hands that had never once held his son.

"I need to not mess him up," he said.

She nodded. "Your son."

"Yeah."

"And his mother?"

His throat closed. "I need to not mess her up either."

"Okay."

"I already did."

"You didn't know."

"I still wasn't there."

"Those are different things."

"They don't feel different."

"No," she said. "I imagine they wouldn't."

"I don't want to rush her because I'm panicking. I don't want to turn Beau into some way of fixing my own guilt. I don't want to..." He shook his head, hunting for the end of the sentence. "I don't want to be my father."

She let him sit with that for a while.

Then, quietly: "That's a good place to start."

By late September, Sidney had a routine that looked functional to anyone watching from far enough away. He practiced on his own. He started training. He answered team questions normally enough that most people left him alone. He ate when Flower cornered him about it or when hunger got annoying enough to deal with on its own. He looked at houses on Sundays. He went to therapy on Tuesdays. He handled Pat exclusively through email with replies so short and flat that even Pat eventually stopped trying to warm them up.

Pat wanted a meeting. Sidney put him off for ten days, then finally agreed, because the business side couldn't be avoided forever no matter how badly he wanted it to be. They met in a private room off a hotel restaurant, because Sidney had refused, flatly, to let the man into his home. Pat arrived in a suit, carrying a leather folder under his arm like this was a contract negotiation and not the wreckage of every ounce of trust Sidney had ever given him.

Sidney didn't stand when he walked in. Pat noticed. Sidney watched him notice.

"Sidney."

"Pat."

They sat across a polished table from each other. A waitress came and went. Sidney ordered water. Pat ordered coffee. Neither of them touched the menus.

Pat folded his hands together. "I'm glad you agreed to meet."

"I'm not here because I wanted to see you."

Something flickered across Pat's face. "Fair enough."

Sidney looked at him and felt no simple feeling. The rage had burned hot enough back in Nova Scotia to leave something colder behind it now. Pat had been part of his life for years. Trusted. Respected. One of the adults who'd run the machinery around him back when Sidney was too young to understand how much power he was handing over just by trusting the wrong people with it. And Pat had looked at you, or maybe never really looked at you at all, and decided you were a liability.

"My attorney is reviewing every agreement I have with you," Sidney said.

Pat's jaw tightened slightly. "That's your right."

"I know."

"I hope you understand everything done at the time was done with your future in mind."

"Don't."

Pat's mouth closed.

"Don't sit there and tell me it was for my future."

"Sidney, you were eighteen."

"She was eighteen."

Pat looked away, just for half a second.

That was enough.

"She was eighteen," Sidney repeated, quieter now, and somehow that was worse. "And pregnant. And terrified. And every one of you treated her like a threat."

"We didn't know she'd keep the baby."

Sidney's hand closed around his glass hard enough that his knuckles went white. For one full second he went blind with anger.

"Say that again," he said, very quietly.

Pat held his gaze for a moment, then dropped it. "I shouldn't have phrased it that way."

"You shouldn't have thought it that way."

A muscle worked once in Pat's jaw.

"I missed my son being born," Sidney said. "I missed his first word. I missed three years, Pat. Do you understand that? Do you have any idea what you took from me?"

Pat didn't answer.

"I can't trust you," Sidney said. "I don't know if that changes. I don't know if there's a professional path forward from here. I don't know if I even want there to be one."

"Sidney."

"No." His voice stayed level, which was somehow scarier than if it hadn't. "You don't get to manage this. You don't get to decide what's productive, what the media strategy is, how to minimize the damage. They're not damage. She isn't damage. My son isn't damage. If I hear one more person in your office talk about either of them like a liability, we're done. Completely."

Pat nodded slowly. "Understood."

"I want full transparency from now on. Everything. Every call, every meeting, every decision that has my name anywhere near it."

"Of course."

Sidney stood.

Pat looked up at him. "That's it?"

"For now."

"We should discuss Pittsburgh media before camp opens."

"No."

"Sidney."

"No," he said again, and this time there was no room left in it for negotiation. "You don't get anywhere near that part of my life. Not unless she wants you there. And she doesn't even know if she wants me there."

Pat had nothing left to say to that. Sidney left before the coffee ever arrived. Outside, the air still held the last warmth of summer, but there was a thin edge of fall underneath it now. He walked home instead of calling a car. The apartment was fifteen blocks off. His legs needed the movement. His head needed the noise of the city drowning out everything else in it for a while.

He passed a toy store on the way and made it three steps past the window before he stopped walking.

"Fuck," he muttered, to nobody.

He turned around and went back.

Inside, the store was bright and crowded, shelves of puzzles and stuffed animals and wooden trains and picture books and little plastic worlds built for kids who hadn't learned yet that adults could ruin things. Sidney stood just inside the door with his hands shoved in his pockets, overwhelmed in a way he hadn't braced himself for.

He had no idea what a three year old liked. He walked the aisles slow, feeling ridiculous, feeling like a fraud. Buying something felt presumptuous, like trying to purchase love he hadn't earned. Like skipping steps he didn't have the right to skip. Like one wrong toy could somehow say exactly how little he knew about his own son.

An employee asked if he needed help.

He almost said no on reflex.

Then he said, "I'm looking for something for a three-year-old boy."

"What's he into?"

Sidney swallowed hard.

"Hockey," he said. Then, softer: "And dinosaurs."

She smiled. "We've got a few things for that."

He left with a small dinosaur book, a soft green stegosaurus, and a mesh bag of foam balls for indoor play. He didn't send any of it. He put the bag in the hall closet, because looking at it hurt too much. Took it out an hour later and set it on the dining table instead. Moved it to the bedroom. Moved it back to the closet. Finally he just sat down on the floor in front of the closet door with the dinosaur book in his hands and read it cover to cover, twice, like it might tell him something.

It was twelve pages long. The stegosaurus found his family at the end.

He found a house.

Not the final house, maybe. Not a dream house. Not some huge place bought to prove a point to anyone. It was private and tucked far enough back from the road that he could breathe; it had a fenced yard, a kitchen that caught the morning light early. The realtor talked resale value, entertainment potential, security systems, proximity to the rink. Sidney nodded along at all the right places.

He didn't give a single shit about entertaining. He cared about how many bedrooms. He cared about the stairs, whether they were the kind a little kid could take two at a time without cracking his head open. He cared whether there was yard enough for a three year old to run flat out with Sammy at his heels. He cared whether the kitchen was big enough for you to stand in without feeling cornered by him. He cared whether the street was quiet, whether the windows locked properly, whether the driveway had room, whether there was a bedroom that could someday, maybe, if you ever let it, belong to Beau.

Not soon. Maybe not for a long time. Maybe never, if you decided Pittsburgh was too far, decided he was too much, decided Beau should only ever know him in careful, supervised afternoons back in Halifax. Sidney made himself hold that possibility without cracking down the middle over it. Therapy helped with that. Barely. But it helped.

Still, he let himself imagine anyway.

Beau tearing down a hallway in dinosaur pajamas. You sitting on the edge of a bed reading him a story in a voice Sidney had loved since he was fifteen years old. Himself standing in the doorway, not intruding, just allowed. Just watching. Just learning how to be there.

He walked into one of the upstairs bedrooms and stood in the middle of it. Pale blue walls. A window looking out over the backyard. He could picture a small bed under it, maybe dinosaur sheets, maybe not, maybe Beau would've moved on to something else entirely by then, cars or space or some cartoon Sidney had never even heard of. Maybe he'd want nothing to do with any of it. Maybe he'd stand in this exact doorway someday, small and wary, and ask where his mama was.

He put in an offer the next morning.

He didn't call, because you didn't have a phone. That was the practical excuse. He didn't call because calling your parents' landline felt like stepping onto a live wire. That was the honest one. He didn't call because he was terrified he'd hear your voice and immediately ask for more than he had any right to. That was the one he never said out loud, not even to the therapist with the kind eyes.

Mike called bullshit.

They were in the temporary apartment when Mike came by to drop off Sam. Temporary was a generous word for it. There were boxes still sat stacked by the front door. Sam's bowls sat on a towel in the corner. His hockey bag leaned against the wall in the hallway like the only real sign that anyone actually lived there.

Sidney sat on the floor because the couch still felt too stiff. Sam had her head on his thigh, one paw twitching through some dream. Mike had come down partly because he was a good friend and partly, mostly, because he'd appointed himself in charge of making sure Sidney didn't vanish completely into whatever dark hole he was clearly building for himself one silent night at a time.

"You're being stupid," Mike said.

Sidney stared at the wall. "Thanks."

"No, I mean it. Fully stupid."

"I got that part."

"You have her parents' names. My parents know people who know them. Half of Cole Harbour knows the other half of Cole Harbour, Sid. Somebody could get you the landline in about ten minutes."

Sidney's hand kept moving slow over Sam's head. "And then what?"

"And then you call."

"She told me not to disappear."

"Exactly."

"She also told me to be patient."

Mike stared at him from the couch. "Calling a landline is not the same as breaking into her apartment through a window, man."

Sidney's jaw flexed.

Mike leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "You're hiding behind careful."

That landed. Sidney glared at him.

"I'm not hiding."

"You are."

"I'm trying not to scare her."

"No," Mike said. "You're trying not to scare yourself."

Sidney looked away first.

Mike sighed. "Look. I'm not saying call and demand anything. I'm not saying call and ask when you can see him. I'm saying call and tell her you made it to Pittsburgh. That you're figuring things out. That you're not gone."

Sidney dragged both hands down his face, careful not to wake Sam. "What if her mom answers?"

"Then be polite."

"What if her dad answers?"

"Then be very polite."

Sidney gave him a flat look.

Mike shrugged. "Or let the man threaten you. Honestly, you've got a few of those coming."

"I know."

"I don't think you do."

Something shifted across Sidney's face. Mike saw it land wrong and decided he could be gentler. He hadn't meant to hurt him. But he'd been the one standing in that grocery store aisle. He'd seen Beau with his own eyes before Sidney had known a single thing. He'd watched your anger at Sidney's name. He'd carried all of it alone for days before anyone else caught up, and guilt had made him clumsy too, in his own way.

"I'm sorry," Mike said.

Sidney shook his head. "Don't."

"You don't need everybody taking a swing at you."

"I kind of do."

"No," Mike said, firmer now. "You don't. You need to get your head on straight."

Sidney let out a laugh with nothing funny in it. "Yeah. Sure."

"I'm serious."

"I know you are."

"So start somewhere."

Sidney looked around the apartment. Somewhere. That was the whole problem. Everything needed starting from scratch. His living situation. His relationship with his parents, which currently didn't exist. His relationship with Taylor. Mario and Nathalie, who he still couldn't think about for longer than a few seconds without feeling sick to his stomach. His agent. His own career, even, though that was the least of it. You. Beau.

He pressed the heel of his hand hard into one eye.

Mike's voice dropped low. "You thinking about him?"

Sidney didn't answer. He didn't need to.

Mike leaned back into the couch. "Yeah."

"I don't know how to do this."

"Nobody knows how to do this."

"That's not helpful."

"It's true, though."

"I'm supposed to be his dad," Sidney said, and his voice came out rough. "How am I supposed to do that from here?"

Mike's mouth twisted sideways. "Badly, at first."

Sidney looked at him.

"I'm not trying to be a dick," Mike said. "Okay, maybe a little. But you're gonna be bad at it, because everybody's bad at it at first. Difference is most guys get to be bad at it with a newborn who doesn't know any better. You're starting with a three year old who's already fully conscious."

Despite himself, Sidney's mouth twitched.

Mike pointed at him. "There it is. Almost a smile. Somebody mark the calendar."

"Shut up."

"Gladly. Right after you call her."

The almost-smile disappeared.

Mike groaned. "Dude."

"I can't."

"Yes, you can."

"No, Mike," Sidney snapped, then dropped his voice fast when Sam's head popped up, ears half raised. He stroked her back down until she settled again. "I can't. Not yet."

Mike went quiet.

Sidney stared down at Sam's fur, hand moving without thinking. "If I call and she doesn't want to talk to me, I don't know what I do after that."

"You survive it."

"She shouldn't have to make me survive anything else."

Mike's expression shifted.

Sidney swallowed hard. "I already made this whole thing about me. I get that I didn't choose to not know, but that doesn't matter to her, does it. It's all the same for her. She was alone. She raised him alone. I don't get to just show up and start taking."

"So send a letter."

Sidney looked up.

Mike shrugged, like it was obvious. "You don't have to make her answer you in the moment. Send it to her parents' place. Or her apartment, if you know the address."

"I know the building."

"Of course you do."

Sidney sat with that a second.

A letter felt old fashioned. Maybe cowardly. Maybe just careful, or maybe both at once, no way to tell them apart from the inside. It would give you something you could hold in your hands, or tear up, or shove in a drawer and never open again. It would let him tell you he'd made it to Pittsburgh, that he wasn't gone, without you having to pick up a phone and hear his voice before you were ready to.

"What would I even say?"

Mike gave him a look. "Sid. I know you've been mentally writing this letter since the second you found out."

That was probably true. He'd been drafting a thousand versions of it in his head for weeks.

I'm sorry.

I know I'm not supposed to say sorry too many times.

I got to Pittsburgh.

Sam came with Mike.

I keep thinking about pancakes because your mom told me Beau likes them.

I don't know how to be here when you're there.

I want to do this right.

I don't know what right even is.

Please tell Beau I said hi.

No. Too much. Don't put Beau's name in it yet.

I'm not gone.

That was the only piece of it that actually mattered. Everything else was noise around that one true thing.

Sidney stood up so fast Sam startled awake, head shooting up, ears half raised, blinking at him.

"Sorry, girl," he murmured, dropping a hand to her head.

Mike watched him. "Where are you going?"

"To find paper."

"You own paper?"

Sidney stopped mid-step. They both looked around the apartment at the same time. He did not, in fact, own paper.

Mike sighed and got to his feet. "I'll drive."

They ended up at a pharmacy, because apparently the first written word from Sidney Crosby to the mother of his child, after four stolen years and the discovery of a lifetime, would be drafted on a legal pad picked up next to the toothpaste and the discount sunscreen. Mike found the envelopes. Sidney stood too long in front of a half-cleared display of Father's Day cards, leftovers nobody had bothered pulling from the shelves.

World's Best Dad.

Dad, You're My Hero.

For the Man Who Taught Me Everything.

Sidney stared until the words blurred into nothing but blurs. Mike appeared at his elbow and quietly took the legal pad out of his hand before he could crush it in his fist.

"Come on," he said.

Sidney nodded and followed him out.

Back at the apartment, he sat at the kitchen counter for almost two hours. Mike kept the TV low in the living room. Sam settled at Sidney's feet, sensing something in him worth staying close for. He wrote three versions.

The first ran too long, spilled everywhere, dragged in his whole childhood, your relationship, the draft, the phone, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, the night he'd driven around Cole Harbour with the truth burning a hole through him, Beau's sleeping face in the backseat of his car. It felt like bleeding straight onto the page and asking you to help him one last time so he tore it out.

The second came out too careful. The kind of thing an agent might have approved before it went out. It sounded like a statement, not a man. He tore that one out too.

The third was short. He sat with it a long time after he finished, just looking at it. Then he folded it before he could ruin it by reading it one more time. He didn't send it that night. Cowardice again, maybe. Or maybe just that he didn't own a single stamp. Or maybe because once it left his hands and reached yours, there was no taking it back.

He set it on the counter next to his keys.

Sam sniffed at it, curious.

"Don't eat that," he muttered.

She wagged her tail once, mildly offended by the accusation.

He slept badly that night, and it became the pattern. Pittsburgh resumed around him and Sidney didn't resume with it. Team training started up. Informal skates. Gym sessions. Medical check ins. Equipment fittings. Familiar hallways, familiar noise, the sound of pucks off boards, guys chirping each other across the room, somebody laughing too loud at nothing, somebody asking how his summer went, someone making a joke about the Cup day, about his birthday, about whether Cole Harbour had finally recovered from the Crosby parade.

Sidney smiled when he was supposed to. Answered what he was asked. Skated. Shot. Worked. But hockey, for the first time in his entire life, felt like something standing between him and the rest of himself, and that scared him more than anything else had in weeks. Hockey had always been the simplest thing in his life. You worked, you got better, you won or you lost, and the pressure meant you mattered somewhere in the world. As a kid the rink had been the one place everything narrowed down into something he actually understood. Edges. Breath. Hands. Vision. Want.

Now he stepped onto the ice and thought about you only weeks pregnant on the night of his first preseason game, sitting alone in your room while he skated a thousand miles away with no idea. He took a faceoff and wondered if his son's hand had ever curled around one of your fingers in a hospital room he'd never seen. He taped his stick and thought of the little plastic one Beau might have. He heard a teammate complain about being tired and thought about you at nineteen, pacing your apartment at two in the morning, begging a baby to sleep. He saw fathers pressed up against the glass with their kids at practice and had to look away every time.

The game hadn't done this to him. He knew that much. Hockey hadn't stolen his phone. Hockey hadn't typed those words. Hockey hadn't blocked your number or convinced your mother he should be kept away. But hockey had been the god everyone around him sacrificed things to, his future, his focus, his image, his path forward. He hated that. Hated that something he'd genuinely loved his whole life had been used as the excuse for tearing apart something that might have mattered more.

Sam stayed close through the nights he cried, which was most of them. He cried for you at eighteen, alone with a positive test and no one to call. He cried for Beau being born into a room Sidney should have been standing in. He cried for the first time Beau said mama and meant, a moment Sidney would never get to have witnessed. He cried for every year he'd spent in arenas full of people screaming his name while, somewhere else entirely, his son learned to walk without him in the room. He cried for Taylor because he missed her and couldn't call. He cried for his mother because he didn't know how to love her right now. He cried for his father because some kid part of him still wanted Troy to say he was sorry and make it all better.

It couldn't go back. That was the wall he kept slamming into, over and over, no matter which direction he tried to come at it from. No matter what he did now, no matter how careful or patient or good he managed to be, he couldn't go back. Couldn't hold your hand in a doctor's office he'd never been in. Couldn't rub your back through morning sickness he'd never witnessed. Couldn't hear Beau's first cry. Couldn't sit in a hospital chair with a newborn weight against his chest and say, hi, buddy, I'm your dad.

He couldn't go back. The best he could do was not run forward so fast he ruined what was left. That turned out to be harder than anything hockey had ever asked of him, because what he actually needed was four years back. He needed to go back to Ottawa and keep his phone in his own hand. He needed to read your text himself and answer it himself. He needed to call you and be terrified right alongside you instead of finding out years too late. He needed to hear you cry and be the one to say okay, okay, we'll figure it out, I've got you. He needed Beau as a newborn against his chest. He needed to know if his son's hand had ever fit around one of his fingers. He needed to know what you'd craved when you were pregnant, what songs you'd hummed to your own belly at night, every ultrasound, every appointment, every three a.m. feeding, every fight the two of you would've had because babies were hard and you were young and he'd have been gone too much even if he'd tried his best.

He needed the impossible and he kept needing it anyway.

~

You were in the middle of a haircut when your mom called the salon.

Not called you, because you still didn't have a phone, an increasingly ridiculous detail in the ongoing tragedy of your life. She called the front desk, and your coworker Jenna came over to your station with the cordless pressed to her shoulder, eyebrows already up near her hairline.

"It's your mom."

You froze with the scissors still in your hand.

Your client, Mrs. Donnelly, caught your eyes in the mirror. "Everything all right, dear?"

"Yeah," you said quickly, setting the scissors down on the counter. "Sorry. One second."

Jenna mouthed, You want me to finish?

You shook your head and took the phone.

"Mom?"

"Nothing's wrong," she said immediately which made it worse.

Your knees nearly buckled with relief and irritation at the exact same time. "Jesus, don't do that to me."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"What happened?"

"A letter came."

The salon fell away from you completely. The blow dryers dulled to a wind somewhere far off. The hairspray and shampoo and hot flatiron smell faded out of your senses like someone had turned a dial. You watched your own face go blank in the mirror in front of you.

"A letter," you repeated.

"Yes."

"From him?"

"Yes."

Your fingers tightened around the phone hard enough to hurt. Mrs. Donnelly, bless her, suddenly found the magazine in her lap fascinating. Jenna hovered two stations down, pretending not to hover at all.

"What does it say?"

"I didn't open it."

"I know, but the envelope."

"It's addressed to you."

"At your house?"

"Yes."

You closed your eyes. He hadn't called. He hadn't forced your parents into being messengers in some pressured, awful moment. He'd written it down instead. Careful, maybe. Cowardly, maybe. Or both, tangled together the way most of his choices seemed to be lately.

"You want me to bring it by?" your mom asked.

You glanced at the clock. Three more clients this afternoon. Beau needed picking up at five. There were towels tumbling in the dryer and rent due Friday, and somewhere in the states Sidney Crosby had mailed you a letter like it was 1942 and your heart was the single most inconvenient organ on the planet.

"No," you said. "I'll come get it after work."

"All right."

"Don't read it."

"I won't."

"Don't let Dad read it either."

"He won't."

"Mom."

"He won't," she said again, softer this time. "I promise you."

You nodded, even though she obviously couldn't see it.

"How are you holding up?" she asked.

You let out a small, humorless laugh. "I'm doing haircuts right now, so, dangerous question to ask a girl."

"Fair."

"I have to go."

"Okay, sweetheart."

You handed the phone back to Jenna, who gave you one long look. "You okay?"

"Nope."

"Cool. Coffee?"

"After Mrs. Donnelly, assuming I don't cut bangs I'll regret for the rest of her natural life."

Mrs. Donnelly lowered her magazine just enough to peer over the top of it. "Take your time, dear. At my age, a little suspense is good for the circulation."

You laughed, because honestly, what else was there to do?

You finished the haircut. Then the next one. Then a trim for a teenager who wanted layers but not too many layers and absolutely, under no circumstances, wanted to lose any length. You swept hair off the floor. You smiled at the right moments. You booked next appointments. You pretended your whole body wasn't focused on an envelope sitting on your parents' kitchen counter waiting for you.

When you picked Beau up from daycare, he came barreling out with a construction paper crown on his head and glitter bits stuck to his cheek.

"Mama!"

"Hi, baby."

"I made a crown."

"I see that."

"I'm a king."

"Of course you are."

"King Beau."

"Very fancy."

He threw himself into your arms and you caught him with a grunt, lifting him onto your hip. "Oh my God, you're getting heavy."

"I'm growing."

"Stop that."

"No."

"Rude."

He grinned up at you, delighted with himself. "Can we see Nana?"

You hesitated then you looked at his face, at the glitter and the crooked crown and the total certainty in him that of course you'd say yes, and you understood there was no version of this afternoon where you walked into your parents' house without him. Beau was part of this. Not the letter, exactly, but the life in it, yes. Always yes.

"Yeah," you said. "We can see Nana."

"And Papa?"

"And Papa."

"Can I bring my crown?"

"Obviously. Kings need crowns."

Your dad had the door open before you even knocked, because Beau announced himself from the walkway at a volume that carried clear down the street.

"Papa! I'm royalty!"

Your dad gasped like he'd been personally struck. "Your Majesty."

Beau held out one hand, palm down, waiting. Your dad, a man who had sworn up and down he'd never be one of those grandparents, bent at the waist and kissed his knuckles with a loud smooch.

You stared at him. "Seriously?"

He looked up, unbothered. "Show some respect. We're in the presence of the crown."

Beau nodded, grave as a judge. "Yes, Mama."

"Unbelievable."

Your mom appeared in the doorway behind him and the sight of her made you nervous because she had the envelope in her hand. Plain white. Your name across the front. His handwriting. You knew the slight lean to the letters before you ever got your hands on it. The way he wrote your name like he was concentrating hard on getting it right. You hadn't seen his handwriting in years, not outside old birthday cards and notes shoved into the garbage bag at the back of your childhood closet, the ones you'd never had the heart to burn.

Your mom didn't hand it over right away. She waited until your dad had lured Beau off with the promise of juice and a snack, and only then did she step toward you and hold it out. You took it like it might scorch you on contact. The paper felt heavier in your hand than it should have. Or maybe that was just you.

"You can read it here," your mom said. "Or take it home with you."

You stared down at your own name in his handwriting.

"Here," you said.

She nodded and let you go.

You went out to the back porch.

It had always been your thinking place. At fifteen you'd sat out here after Sidney asked you out for the first time. At eighteen you'd avoided it entirely, because the porch reminded you too much of waiting for a phone that wasn't going to ring. When Beau was a newborn you'd stood out here in the freezing dark for thirty seconds at a stretch, just to breathe air that didn't smell like babies. Now you sat down on the steps with Sidney's letter in your lap. You opened the envelope slowly, like it might tear if you rushed it. One page. Blue ink.

You stared at the first line a long time before you let yourself actually read it.

I got to Pittsburgh.

That was it. That was the whole first sentence.

You pressed your lips together hard.

I don't want this letter to ask anything from you, so I'm going to try hard not to. I just wanted you to know I got here, and I'm not gone. I know those are two different things.

You breathed in shakily.

Sam is with me. Mike says she slept almost the whole way and then acted like she did all the work once they got here.

A laugh broke out of you at the thought of his dog before you could stop it, sudden enough that you had to cover your mouth with your free hand.

I'm in an apartment right now. It's temporary. I'm looking for somewhere more permanent. I'm trying to make sure my life has room before I ask for any place in yours.

Your eyes blurred.

I don't know what the right pace is. I don't know what to say to Beau, or when I'm allowed to say anything to him at all. I don't know how to do this without making it harder on you. I'm scared of doing it wrong. I'm scared of doing nothing and having that be wrong too.

You wiped at your cheek with the back of your hand.

I keep thinking about what you said. If I'm scared, I call. If I don't know what to do, I say that. I don't have a number to call, so I'm saying it here instead.

I'm scared and I don't know what to do but I'm here. I always will be

The last line sat by itself at the very bottom of the page.

Sid.

Not Sidney.

Sid.

Your very best friend. You folded the letter carefully along the creases his own hands had made. Then you unfolded it and read the whole thing again. And again. And again, until you could hear his voice reading through every sentence like he was sitting right beside you on the step.

Your mom came out onto the porch a while later. She didn't ask what it said. She sat down next to you with a cup of tea in one hand and a juice box in the other, handed you the tea, set the juice box on the step for whenever Beau inevitably came looking for it, and turned her face out toward the yard. You held the letter in your lap.

"He says he's scared," you said.

Her eyes softened.

"He says he doesn't know what to do."

"That sounds honest."

You nodded.

"He says he's not gone."

Your mom took a slow breath in.

Inside the house, Beau's voice rang out. "Nana, where are you?"

"Porch," she called back.

A second later the screen door banged open and Beau came out with his crown listing sideways off his head and a cracker clutched in one fist.

"Whatcha doing?"

"Having tea," your mom said.

He eyed her cup. "I don't like tea."

"You haven't tried this tea."

"I don't like that tea."

You smiled despite everything.

He saw the letter in your lap. "What's that?"

Your fingers tightened around it. Your mom went very still beside you, waiting, giving you nothing but room. You looked at your son and understood that you didn't have to hand him everything today. You didn't have to make this moment bigger than his small shoulders could hold up under. You didn't have to say the word father. You could start small and let the rest come later. Five minutes at a time. That was all anyone was asking of you. That was all you had to give right now.

"A letter," you said.

"From who?"

You swallowed hard.

"From Sid."

Recognition lit up his whole face. "Your best friend?"

"Yeah," you said softly. "My best friend."

He nodded and leaned his weight against your knee. "What'd he say?"

You looked down at the page. Then at your mother. Then back at your son's waiting face.

"He said he got home safe."

"Oh," Beau said, satisfied. "That's good."

"Yeah," you whispered. "That's good."

Beau grabbed the juice box off the step and climbed into your lap without asking because he never asked. He was getting too big for this too and neither you nor anyone with a soul was ever going to be the one to tell him that. You wrapped an arm around him, the letter still held careful in your other hand.

The porch boards were warm under your bare feet. Your mom sat quiet beside you. Your dad yelled something from inside about King Beau abandoning his kingdom and someone needing to explain the resulting constitutional crisis.

Beau hollered back, "I'm busy!"

You laughed for the first time all day.

—

previous part | part one

#nhl x reader

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#nhl x reader