“I have tape from your final playoff game. And I just got off the phone with Sasha Marshall. We hired her, too. And she wants you in front of the net.”
“Sasha Marshall,” I’d whispered. Hearing my college coach’s name had made it real.
“That’s right,” Bess had said. “At the last minute we lost a goalie who decided to play in Sweden. And Sasha thought of you. Can I have her call you?”
And that had been that. Seven days later, I’d been on a plane to New York. I’d barely had time to pack and tell my closest friends that I was leaving Ontario.
There’s one person in particular that I did not tell. Bryce Campeau, a center for the Brooklyn Bruisers, and the man I once believed I would marry.
He’s going to be astonished to see me standing here. If he ever looks up.
The Bruisers are clustered around their coach, listening intently. People expect big things from the Bruisers this year. It’s too early to talk of the championship, but they are well-positioned for the season. Which means I basically have a front-row seat to watch Bryce fulfill his dreams.
He stands stock sill in his skates, his whole being focused on his coach’s words. Bryce is the most serious man I’ve ever met. And when he finds out I’ve suddenly appeared in Brooklyn, he’ll—
Okay, the truth is that I’m not exactly sure what he’ll do. He and I have lots of history, but not the romantic kind. He’d lived in our family’s house throughout my teen years, billeted as a junior hockey player on one of my father’s teams.
We’d often had players living with us. They had been brash, silly boys, and I hadn’t paid them much attention. But Bryce had been different from the start. At seventeen, he’d been a man already, with a serious expression and moody, dark blue eyes. Like me, he’d had a French-speaking mother. And like my mother, he was a devout Catholic.
But Bryce was alone in the world. He never met his father. His mother tried her best to give him a good life, he’d said, but by the time he came to live with us, she had died of complications from liver disease.
“She drank. A lot,” he’d told us frankly. “She quit many times, but it got her in the end.”
So there’d been this kid, only seventeen years old when he’d arrived, and motherless. He’d been playing for an Ontario team and could barely understand his coach, or my father, who ran the program.
My mother had taken one look at his solemn face and the gold crucifix around his neck and saw a kindred spirit. She’d basically adopted him on sight. She could tell he needed someone to fuss over him—someone to make foods that he liked and organize his life and sit beside him at Mass on Sunday.
And I’d loved him from the first moment I watched his broody gaze scan my home, taking in my mother’s collection of prayer candles and the carefully set table. He’d walked over to the mantel, noticing that one of Maman’s statuettes had tipped to the side. And he carefully righted it. “Thank you for to bring me here in your home,” he’d said in very halting English.
I’d liked the soft, measured tone of his voice. And I’d really liked that he needed my help with the language. As a French speaker myself, I would often come to his rescue, translating whenever he required it.
My father had required him to speak English at the dinner table. He’d known that Bryce needed to learn. But Maman and I had been his port in the storm. We spoke French when my father was out of the house, and we helped him adjust to life in a new city.
I’d hid my crush on him as best I could. And he and my mother were thick as thieves, as we say in English.
Bryce had lived with us for four years. And when, at age twenty, he’d left to play for Montreal, we’d all been so incredibly proud of him.
I’d missed him terribly, but I’d been self-aware enough to know that he viewed me like a little sister. Besides—I was headed off to college at the University of Michigan.
And there had been holidays and summers to look forward to. We had become Bryce’s family, so he spent his free time with us. I’d lived for those moments when he’d watch movies with me in the den, and my mother would spoil him rotten.
Then—a couple years later—my mother died very suddenly. One day she was home with my dad and baking cookies. And the next day she was just gone. She had a brain aneurysm and drove her car into a ditch, dying behind the wheel of her car before the police even arrived.
We’d been devastated. Bryce—recently traded to the Bruisers—was the first person I’d called after my father broke the news. “Sit down, I need to tell you something. Maman is gone.”
The next few days had been a blur. Bryce told Coach Worthington that the mother of his heart had suddenly died, and Coach took the extraordinary step of sending him home to us for a week. He’d missed three games to come to Ontario and hold my hand at her funeral.
My father was beside himself. He’d loved her desperately. “My beautiful rose,” he’d sobbed at the kitchen table the night after the funeral. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without her.”
Bryce had finally teared up, too. It had broken me to see them so sad, so I’d gone to bed, tucking myself in and wishing I could wake up and have my old life back—the one where my mother hummed to herself in the kitchen while she made tea.
Later, Bryce had come into my darkened room, climbed into bed with me, and held me in his arms. That had never happened before.
“Sylvie,” he’d said quietly. “I want to love like that, Sylvie. The way your father and your mother were to one another. That could be us. Some day we will be together for real.”
“Oui?” I’d asked, stunned. “Vraiment?”
“Vraiment,” he’d repeated. “She wanted me to take care of you.”
“She did?”
“Oui. And I promised her I would. You are so special to me. You are everything. Fate sent you to me. I know it.” He’d said a lot of things that night that I’d never expected him to say.
Then he’d kissed me. I’d already been on emotional overload, but Bryce’s kisses had been the only thing that made me feel better about the terrible, gut-wrenching loss I’d just suffered.
My achy heart had held Bryce’s promises tightly. Thoughts of our future together had sustained me for weeks after he left.
I should have known, though. Words spoken in the dark after you bury someone you love are not weighed and measured like other words.
Our friendship returned to its usual ways: texts from the team jet and the occasional phone call where he would speak to my father and then to me.
I’d thought about him every day, though. Bryce’s whispered word in the dark—someday—got me through a lot of difficult hours.
But he hadn’t brought up our future again, and eventually I’d grown impatient. This spring—six months after my mother’s death—I asked Bryce when we could be together for real. “I would come to Brooklyn,” I’d offered. “To be with you.”
It had not gone over well. His stammering reply was not at all what I’d hoped for. My heart sank as he’d uttered phrases like “too soon,” “incredibly busy,” and “focused on my game.”
“When, then?” I’d asked, trying to hold my heart together.