Chapter Three

October

Eric somehow managed to get through training camp, even if he wanted to scream . If playing against Sullivan was annoying, coaching with him was infinitely worse. There was, after all, a limit to how many times Eric could say to him, "Look, I know you coached peewee for a while, but this isn't peewee anymore. This is the big show."

There were only so many times Sullivan could stare back at him and say, "There are translatable skills. I'm not trying to teach them how to do a perfect face-off in conditions that aren't replicable in a game, Aronson. We're trying to teach them how to trust their own judgment and make snap decisions in an actual game."

On the ice, too, Eric was constantly aware of Sullivan's presence. Even though he was small enough that he'd get constantly lost in a crowd of giant hockey players, Eric could practically sense him anyway, see his crooked smile and intense expression. The stupid little repetitive habits he had that were so annoying: a hand constantly running through his hair, his teeth digging into his lower lip. Sullivan was so enthusiastic when he talked that he practically vibrated with it, and everything about him made Eric want to grab him and shove him down on the ice. Just to get him to shut up.

Not for any other reason.

Really the worst part about all of it was that the players were already responding. It was a novel approach, Eric had to give Sullivan that much. It was different from any training camp Eric had ever been in before, either as a player or a coach. He couldn't say for sure if it was better. They didn't have a regular-season record to base it on. But the players from Cook to Sinclair to Rodion Afanasyev, a defenseman who was pushing forty but stubbornly hanging on for the last few years of his contract, seemed engaged, having fun.

It wasn't that Eric was bitter that they hadn't seemed to be having fun in his practices. Again, this was training camp. It was about preparing for the season, not about having fun.

Eric actually looked forward to the beginning of the preseason games, mostly because whatever high-and-mighty ideals Sullivan might have had about the practices, they would have to translate on the bench.

The thing about coaching in the major leagues was that it was complete chaos. You were both a general keeping an eye on things from afar and an NCO right in the thick of it.

It was your responsibility to make sure that the lines were called and changed appropriately, that no one was stuck out on too-long shifts. You had to make sure you were telling the boys to switch up the tactics if they were getting jammed in the neutral zone and the passes weren't getting through. You had to keep an eye on things to be able to make the appropriate coach's challenges—whether for offsides or goaltender interference—and you had to judge whether it was worth risking a power play if you got it wrong. You had to keep an eye on the pulse of the team in case they needed the time-out, in case things were collapsing quickly.

Basically, things were always moving. It was like watching a car's engine churning, but more chaotic. Things didn't run in their neat, expected paths, on carefully defined grids. You had to be ready for anything.

"Have you ever done this before?" Sullivan asked, as they sat in his office before the game. Petey sat slumped in one of the chairs nearby, catching his usual pregame nap anywhere and everywhere he could.

Eric looked away from Petey, who clearly wasn't going to answer. "Coach a pro game? Or run a major league bench?"

"Both."

Eric narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out Sullivan's angle. His face was as open and pleasant as ever, his light brown eyes focused and interested. Eric wanted to punch him. "Never headed the bench myself. I was down in Providence with Leclerc, and I came up to Boston with him. But Petey's got seniority, and the few games Leclerc missed with an illness, he was the one who got to step up."

"They didn't offer him the job?"

"I think he made it clear that even if they were considering it, he didn't want it. And besides, we aren't the direction the management wanted to go in," Eric said. It came out belligerent, like a challenge. He had his arms crossed over his chest, equally aware of the defensive posture.

Sullivan didn't take the bait. Just looked at Eric again. It was really fucking unfair that he looked the way he did, the laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes and mouth, the way his lip curved in a half smile. Eric had to get over it: it didn't matter that Sullivan was attractive when—

Sullivan said, "I've never done this, either. I mean, a hockey game's a hockey game. I had my peewee team, and I did a bit of unofficial coaching myself in the late years of my career. But it was different doing it from the ice and in the room."

Eric snorted. "I'll say. Don't tell me you're fucking nervous."

"I'm not nervous ," Sullivan said, and rolled his eyes. "I don't get nervous."

"I'm not nervous ," Eric repeated, in the exact same intonation, just a little mocking.

"I'm just—what is your problem?"

"I don't have a problem, it's just that you're pretty damn full of yourself, huh?"

"What are you trying to say?"

Petey opened one eye. "I need to put you boys in a get-along shirt?"

"No," Sullivan said, and he took a deep breath. "I was just trying to...have a conversation. Not get my head bitten off again."

Petey turned a baleful eye on Eric, who frowned. "Don't look at me like that, Peter McCaskill."

Petey closed his eyes again, a distant smile on his lips. "Peter McCaskill, eh? Careful, I'm gonna think my mother showed up to sit on the bench as well. Since she's the only one who ever calls me that."

Sullivan had evidently decided that he wasn't going to get what he wanted out of either Eric or Petey and started gathering his papers and his iPad. "Your mother could probably have helped improve the team's record last year," Sullivan said primly, as he headed for the door.

Petey's eyes flew open. He turned his entire body toward Eric, like he was making sure he wouldn't miss a single second of Eric's head slowly expanding and exploding with fury. Petey had a much higher-pitched laugh than you'd expect from such a big man, wheezy and delighted. When he finally caught his breath again, he managed, "The old dog's got some bite in him after all," and promptly started howling again.

Eric took a deep breath, and then another. He wondered what kind of a fine he'd get if he pushed his head coach off of the bench and onto the ice in the middle of the game. For a brief second, he regretted the fact that now that he wasn't playing anymore, he couldn't just throw down. Couldn't just sink his teeth into a problem. Petey was laughing at him, which was how he knew that if he showed exactly how much Sullivan infuriated him, it would only get worse from here. He took another breath.

"You better get it together, Petey," Eric muttered, standing and stalking out of the room to the sound of Petey's whoops behind him.

Ryan's head was a mess, and it wasn't because he was nervous, whatever Aronson would have liked to imply. The problem was that he had a billion pieces of information knocking around in there on the best of days, and it was even worse now that he was preparing to go out on the bench for his first professional coaching game. He took a second to close his eyes, shove the extraneous bullshit into the background and try to focus on the things that really mattered.

Namely: the roster was mostly rookies and prospects, the few stragglers he hadn't sent back to their juniors teams because he wanted to see what they could do against men, so he wasn't expecting much. Secondarily, he needed to see if he could keep up with the pace of major league line changes and matchups. It was a home game, so he had last change, and the ability to control them more easily than he would have otherwise. But that didn't mean shit if he wasn't at the absolute top of his game.

As they went down the hall toward the bench, Williams swung by to check in with him. He wasn't particularly tall, but in his skates and Ryan in his shoes, he loomed above anyway. Williams was a handsome kid, almost the polar opposite of Cook. Cook was as white as a white kid who'd grown up in small-town Manitoba could be, and Williams hailed from New York, with a Filipina mother and a Black father.

Where Cook was blond, Williams had dark, thick hair; where Cook's complexion was pale and splotchy red, Williams's skin was a deep brown. And where Cook was a tiny spark plug, Williams was solid and steady, deceptively strong. He had a sense of humor hidden underneath his serious face but was already shouldering more responsibility than a twenty-two-year-old should have had to, and it showed.

"All ready, Coach?" Williams asked.

"Sure," Ryan said, and laughed. "Might as well get thrown into the deep end."

Williams looked sideways at him again, like he was trying to gauge whether or not Ryan was actually freaking out. It was a very funny gesture, like a kid who'd only had a couple of shortened seasons would be able to do anything about it. Apparently, whatever he saw eased his mind. "Well, I'll try to make it as easy as possible for you."

"That's really not your responsibility," Ryan said, but he couldn't keep the corner of his mouth from tipping up in a smile. Say whatever you wanted to about the Beacons' overall level of talent after last season's trade deadline massacre and sudden retirements—and the stats writers who published roster summaries and playoff odds certainly did—but it was a good group of guys.

In response, Williams held out his gloved hand to fist-bump. Ryan obliged, and Williams dropped his hand lower for the extended version. It immediately hit him, the memory of developing secret handshakes with his teammates over the years, reenacting them over and over in hallways exactly like this all over the continent. He hadn't expected to have that as a coach. They bumped low, raised it and knocked elbows, that indescribable sense of knowing where the other guy was going even if you'd never done it before.

Williams smiled. "You still got it, huh, Coach?"

"That's what they tell me," Ryan said, and headed out to the bench.

After all of that, the lead-up to the first game was almost anticlimactic. Ryan found that coaching, no matter where you were doing it, was like riding a bike. You didn't just forget because you had suddenly upgraded from a $100 beater to a $10,000 full-suspension mountain bike. Once he got into the swing of things it was easy: he called the line changes, he consulted with Aronson and McCaskill about tactical adjustments and he tried not to overthink things too much.

They were playing the New Jersey Scouts: the team hadn't made the leap last year that their fans had hoped, but they had qualified for the playoffs and even though they'd gotten knocked out in the first round, they'd taken it to seven games. They were icing the majority of what would be the opening-day roster, probably because they had signed a bunch of free agents over the offseason to complement their homegrown talent who were beginning to come into their own.

It was strange, too, looking over at the bench and seeing Danny Garcia behind it. Ryan remembered playing against the former enforcer in the later years of his own career. Specifically, being knocked on his ass repeatedly by him. He didn't have time to worry about Garcia, though, because the game was starting.

The talent gap was evident.

Williams struck first, scoring on a clean win off of the face-off, but the Beacons were simply outgunned. They made a valiant effort, but they went down 2-1 fairly early and never quite recovered.

Ryan tried to take mental notes for things he'd need to fix later on himself: the rhythm of the line changes was definitely something he'd have to adjust to, working in the feedback from McCaskill and Aronson another. In the peewee league, the team had him, an assistant coach, and the developmental coach, but Ryan had always been the one calling the shots alone on the bench. It was still, ultimately, his responsibility. But Aronson especially had a lot of thoughts he didn't hesitate to offer, and Ryan had to fight back the urge to shove him away.

Aronson in particular had a way of getting up in your personal space when he was annoyed that made Ryan's hackles go up, stomach lurch. As though it would've ever gotten physical in a professional setting? Ridiculous. Ryan had to get it together and talk to the team.

Afterward, Ryan gave them a few minutes, but stopped briefly in the locker room to talk to the guys. He told them the things he'd liked: their hustle, their effort, the fact that they were still skating hard even when they were down. He told them the things he'd like to work on: the neatness of the passes, or more specifically, the lack thereof, playing a bit smarter off the puck, working on positioning. Taking the best shot rather than the available shot. He didn't focus too much on the negative: half of the guys who were playing tonight wouldn't be on the opening-night roster.

It wasn't any easier after the preseason got in full swing. Even though they were in the Atlantic Division, the Beacons mostly played New Jersey, Philadelphia and the New York Liberty during the preseason. Each team had their strengths and weaknesses—Aiden Campbell, the Libs' goalie, was in his last contract year looking pretty rough, for example—but the problem that Ryan had run into was the Beacons' roster. They had a lot of rookies on D, they had a lot of underperforming veteran wingers and their center depth outside of Williams was weak as hell.

"Conroy told me we had some leeway with the deployment of the older forwards, but he wants to showcase them as much as possible for trades," Ryan said, as the three assistant coaches went over the tape after their last preseason loss to the Cons, who were the reigning Cup champions. "But I'm not sure about some of these guys."

Aronson raised one eyebrow and looked Ryan up and down with a skepticism that made him want to scream. "What happened to I'm gonna work with everybody ?"

Ryan exhaled and counted, internally, to ten. "We're still going to work with them. Especially if we have to scratch them during the season, I expect both of you out on the ice with me after practice is over to get extra reps in and make them feel like we're still taking them seriously."

Aronson said, "Whatever you say, Coach."

Petey leaned back in his chair, arms folded behind his head. "I'd like to keep some of the rookies up with the big club rather than send them to the minors. We can have Granlund and Johnson anchoring the first two pairs, but I think it'll be beneficial for the boys to get the time up with us. If we can."

"That would mean keeping Lockwood as a seventh D. He'd be sitting a lot," Ryan said. It wasn't a challenge so much as an observation.

"Right," Petey agreed. "But he's a team-first guy. If we talk to him, he'll understand. We can rotate him in if one of the kids is having a rough game, but we're focusing on development above everything else. He's not going to be part of the long-term future here."

Ryan nodded and looked up at the depth chart handwritten on the whiteboard. The neat columns and rows of forwards and defensemen arranged by position and their place in the organization, color-coded so the eye jumped easily from line to line.

"Jesus," Ryan added, whistling. "I wonder if I can pull Conroy's arm and convince him to trade for a veteran C."

"He won't want to give up the assets," Aronson said, his eyes half-lidded, his fingers steepled in front of his mouth. "This is a rebuilding year, even if he refused to say it. Anything anyone would want isn't something we could afford to give up."

"We'll see how it goes once we start hitting the midseason injury grind. There aren't a lot of great depth options beyond Williams and Novák. I can shuffle the lines to a certain extent, but..." Ryan trailed off and rubbed his eyes. "I think I've narrowed down my final roster for opening night. I'd like both of you to look at it tonight and let me know if you have any differences of opinion tomorrow."

Aronson snorted. "How much of our opinion's actually gonna be taken into account?"

Ryan frowned. What the hell was Aronson's problem, anyway? Ryan hadn't been anything except polite, and Aronson hadn't been anything except snarky and disparaging about the small-area drills, about Ryan's more philosophical ideas regarding the way they should coach. About pretty much everything he did. Maybe it sounded worse in Aronson's deep rumble of a voice, because of Aronson's accent, not as thick as it had been in his youth but still tinged with French, especially on the vowels.

Ryan counted to ten again. "All of it will be taken into account."

Aronson unfolded his lanky body from the chair. He reminded Ryan of a praying mantis constantly about to strike. Probably about to bite Ryan's head off. But that was a bad analogy because that was only after sex. "I'll believe it when I see it. Give me the list."

Ryan gave him the list, and wondered if he scowled deeply enough, whether that would convey the depth of his annoyance. All it did was earn him another scowl in return, like Aronson was determined to win the battle of the glares.

Petey, whistling an off-key tune that Ryan vaguely recognized as the Doors, loped up to Ryan's desk to take his sheet as well. He scanned it quickly and then handed it back. "No notes."

"No notes?"

"'S what I would've done."

"Traitor," Aronson muttered.

Ryan considered whirling on him, snapping, what is your problem . Instead, he said, "Great. See you tomorrow. Lots to do." He turned back to the whiteboard so he didn't have to watch Aronson leaving.

They were starting off the season at home against the Arizona Scorpions, which suited Eric perfectly fine. Not only were the Scorpions perennially tanking, which meant it was a low-stress season opener for a rookie head coach and rookie half of the lineup, it gave him a little more time in the morning to get ready, to scroll through his timeline on Twitter while he was making his morning coffee. Today he frowned at some of the news, then whistled.

"Petey, did you see the Railers shit today?"

"Roney, if you think I read the news, you are sadly mistaken," Petey replied, his face buried in his coffee mug.

"It's a new investigative report. John Wilde."

Petey stared at him blankly.

"You know? The guy who broke the national team scandal last year? The one who's been covering the Thomas charges? The one who wrote about your head trauma class-action lawsuit?"

"I," Petey said, "am just vibing. I don't read the news; it gives me a headache."

"Well," Eric said. "This one's gonna give you a migraine." He flipped through his phone again to pull the article up. He could feel his ears heating up as he thought about it, the fury on several levels: as a person, as a coach, as a guy who cared about the players on his team. "An anonymous player filed a lawsuit yesterday, alleging that during the Railers' last Cup run, he was sexually assaulted by one of the team's assistant coaches. And that the team knew, and that they covered it up so it wouldn't disrupt the playoffs."

Petey peered over his shoulder, and frowned, which was about as expressive a look of disapproval as he ever wore. "Jesus. That's fucking awful, ain't it?"

By that time, Sullivan had come back into the office. He'd already been on the ice that morning, skating before anyone else had gotten there. Eric had scowled at him from the upper levels, annoyed that Sullivan still had all of the power and grace of his playing days, like he hadn't lost a step on his stride even though it had been over five years since his retirement.

"Did you guys see the news?" Sullivan asked.

"Roney was just showing me," Petey said. "Because I don't read the news."

"Probably for the best. Fucking awful," Sullivan said, frowning. "I'm just—Jesus. Even to file anonymously, that poor guy's going to go through so much shit on top of what he's already gone through. And Terrance was coaching them at the time already..."

Richard Terrance had a league-wide reputation, well-earned, as one of the winningest coaches of all time. He was a fucking legend. He'd brought two Cups home to Long Island, and he'd managed one of the rarest feats in the coaching world: longevity. Despite the team's decline in fortunes, the general manager of the Railers had kept him employed. When he eventually did retire there was no question that he was a Hall of Fame candidate.

"If any of the boys have questions, I think we should say something," Sullivan was going on, frowning off into the distance. "That if any of them have issues, they should feel comfortable coming to us. You know?"

Eric rubbed a finger against the bridge of his nose, exasperated again, because Sullivan was right . It was fucking annoying when he was right, even about this. "None of us are anything like that, though."

"I'm not saying—but just, you know. A general statement. I think it's important. Jesus, I gave the same speech to my peewee kids. Fucked up you can't even trust adults to handle this better," Sullivan said, frowning at the printed depth chart.

Eric felt the urge to play devil's advocate, to say maybe Terrance didn't know. He knew enough about the American legal system to know that a complaint was just allegations, that they still had to be proved in court. And he also knew enough about hockey players to know that no one was going to put themselves through this particular wringer if it wasn't true.

The complaint had been detailed. And the complaint had alleged that Terrance had known.

Instead, Eric said, "We can all say something. I don't know how long this is going to go on. I can't imagine the Railers' ownership settling something like this."

"Hell of a note to start the season," Petey said, shaking his head.

"Can't control what's going on in the rest of the league," Sullivan said, "can only control how we handle our guys."

Eric frowned at his phone again. He thought about how he had been at the age the kid had alleged the assault had occurred. He thought about himself, desperate to make the team, willing to do almost anything to achieve the dreams that had dangled just out of reach for so long. He thought about himself, queer and not even with a foot out of the closet like he was now, and how vulnerable that had been. He thought about himself now, in his forties, responsible for the kids he had been all of those years ago.

He thought about someone abusing that trust, and he felt, again, a rush of fury and the regret that he couldn't just go on the ice and beat the shit out of someone. It wasn't fair.

Sullivan was looking at him again. "Aronson? You good?"

"Yes, Coach," he said, flexing his fingers into fists and open again. He stood and, together, the three of them went out to talk to the boys.

Ryan's first game of the regular season wasn't as difficult as he was expecting it to have been. The preseason really had prepared him for what to expect, and it didn't hurt that the Scorpions, frankly, sucked. Granted, the Beacons weren't far behind in the fancy stats race to the bottom, solely based on the roster, but playing the Scorpions you'd never guess that the Beacons were anything except a team full of hot-shit, young-gun talents fully prepared to take the league by storm.

At a certain point, he gave Williams, Cook and Sinclair a little break, and didn't ice them as much in the dying moments of the third. There wasn't any point in running up the score when you were already winning 6-1. Cook already had two goals on the season, and the announcers were practically orgasming over the fact that after having ten goals last year before ending up in the minors, he was now on pace for 164. It obviously wasn't sustainable, but it sure as hell was a fun stat.

"You're really gonna turtle now ?" Aronson demanded. He leaned forward into Ryan's space, looming over him. There wasn't much of a difference in their height with Ryan standing on the bench to be able to actually see what was going on.

"It's not turtling," Ryan said, somehow very aware of how big Aronson was, how little space they had crammed together on the bench. For some reason, it made him feel a bit breathless. "It's the first game of the season, and it's sportsmanship."

"That wasn't like you as a player," Aronson said. They had to yell so they could be heard over the noise of the game and crowd and the players on the bench. "The Ryan Sullivan I played against would've gone for the throat. He would've gotten that last point if he had to break his own damn legs to do it."

"I'm not a player anymore. I'm a coach."

"This is going to come back to bite you in the ass, Sullivan."

Ryan exhaled again. As was becoming more common than he'd like, he had to take a deep breath and count to ten. He thought about saying something like well, you'd fucking know about biting, wouldn't you? But he was going to be the bigger person. If not literally. "Not curb-stomping the Arizona fucking Scorpions in the season opener is not going to come back to bite me in the ass, Aronson."

Aronson shrugged and turned away from him, and Ryan hoped that wasn't caught on the jumbotron. He hadn't been expecting, when he accepted the job, that the hardest part wasn't going to be managing the bench or dealing with the players or even schmoozing with donors and season-ticket holders but getting along with his assistant coaches. Well. Assistant coach. Petey was, as ever, a fucking delight, and so was Heidi.

Aronson, on the other hand, was a demon.

After the game, Ryan stood in the hallway, fist-bumping the guys as they came down the hall. Cook and Williams, the first and second stars of the night along with Davit Kancheli, came through last. Cook was beaming, his rosy cheeks a brilliant red, and Ryan hoped that this would be the start of getting the monkey off his back.

He didn't have much to say in the locker room after the end, except to note that they had played a good game, and that they should keep the momentum going against tougher competition. It was getting easier to come up with the remarks on the fly, the same way he had read the lineups for the room during his later playoff series. The secret was just getting the rhythm of it.

There was a day between games, and the team didn't have an on-ice practice. It was a gym and video day. Ryan took the time to go over tape with Laurent Martel, one of the veteran wingers who'd been underperforming last season and hadn't shown any signs in the preseason or the first game of changing that. Martel was a little standoffish at first, his shoulders hunched.

"This isn't a criticism," Ryan said. "We're here to coach . We're here to help you improve. I think if you work on a few specialized drills with the skills coach, you'll start seeing an improvement."

"I did those drills in juniors," Martel mumbled.

"The thing is, you're always learning. If you think you aren't, then you're stagnating. Like I said, this isn't a knock on you. Just a few things we noticed. And I'm just asking you to keep an open mind." He met Martel's gaze and held it. Martel looked away first. "Good? Good."

After he was done with the forwards, he dropped in on Lewis Segal's session with Kancheli and their backup, Lucas Olsson. The goalie coach was a veteran himself, and he had a particular way of getting through to them that Ryan didn't even bother trying to interpret.

Goaltending had always seemed a bit like magic to him, completely dependent on the whims of the stars and seasons, and the fact that Segal seemed to be able to break it down into a science was good enough for him. He stayed just long enough to make sure that Kancheli and Olsson seemed comfortable and engaged, and then moved on.

The worst part was knowing that after the practice, he'd have to go to his father's house. There wasn't a way to put it off any longer. It was a Friday night, the team was going on the road the next day, and he had promised that he would come home to see everyone before he was thrown back into the busy schedule of travel and games. Some of it wasn't bad: Ryan was genuinely fond of his nieces and nephews, and there were a lot of them. But the rest of it...

It was with an impending sense of doom that Ryan took his car and drove from his hotel near the Spectrum to Southie, where his dad still lived in the big row home where the Sullivan crew had grown up. The blue shiplap house had been in the family for generations, and each son to inherit had put his own touches on it; if the house hadn't been passed down that way it probably would have sold for well over a million dollars, because the neighborhood was changing as surely as his father hated that it was.

Dad hadn't made substantive changes to the house itself, but years ago he had added fencing around the stoop to prevent people from sitting on the steps and smoking cigarettes or shooting up, and he'd hung hundreds of pictures of his sons playing hockey and their draft day portraits in the living room.

Ryan did not feature prominently in the gallery.

By the time he found street parking and walked briskly to the house, it looked like Mark Junior, Kevin, James, and Eddie were already there with their wives and kids. Ryan and Shannon had never had kids: there had been a few miscarriages, and then he'd been on the road so often that they had just sort of mutually agreed to stop trying. At one point, Shannon had been pretty broken up about it, but she'd eventually stopped asking him about a timeline to have a family. Even then, it had always made both of them feel out of place to come home to Ryan's father's house, surrounded by an entire horde of Sullivan children that Shannon would never have. Now it seemed almost like a relief that they hadn't.

Ryan took a deep breath as he unhooked the gate to the steps and walked up, paused outside for a long second before he opened the door.

Inside, the house was chaos. Each of the Sullivan brothers had at least three kids, and when all of them were in the house together it got real loud, real fast. Ryan was immediately mobbed by tiny bodies, ranging in age from two to ten. The teenaged niblings hung back, probably dying to pick his brain about the team—they all played hockey, of course they all played hockey—but way too cool to want to look like that's what they were doing. Ryan hugged everyone, patted some heads, greeted all of the kids in turn and tried to pick himself up from the foyer floor where they'd knocked him.

"Well, look who decided to take time out of his busy schedule and pay a visit," Dad's voice boomed from the living room.

"Hi, Dad," Ryan said, trying not to sound too resigned. With a niece attached to each leg, he limped into the room to pay his respects.

The living room was set up exactly the way it had been when he'd left it, a rough horseshoe of overstuffed couches and his dad's reclining chair in the middle like a throne. Next to him, on the closest couch, sat Chelsea, Ryan's stepmother. It did feel strange calling her that, because she was three years younger than Ryan, but she had been in the picture since very shortly after his mom had passed away. He had been twenty-four and never really warmed up to her. She knew enough not to try actually mothering anyone, but her sudden presence at family events had been a shock. Right now, she turned a tired smile on him; he smiled back, but it wasn't a real one at all.

Ryan's older brothers and their wives were all arranged in varying configurations on the other couches. There was a hierarchy about who sat where, but it depended on whether you were in Dad's favor or not. Ryan would have to take a few minutes getting the lay of the land before he sat anywhere himself. Based solely upon distance from the recliner, Eddie had done something to piss Dad off, and Jimmy had clawed his way back to his position as the golden child. The interfamilial politics were ruthless enough to make a Targaryen sweat.

"I had to find out from Christopher down the block," Dad was telling Jimmy's wife, Andrea. "He didn't even call to tell us, can you believe it?"

Andrea shot Ryan a brief, sympathetic look and said, "I'm sure it all happened very fast, you know how those things can be—"

"Don't be stupid, Andy," Jimmy interrupted her, shaking his head. "Ryan's always been like that. A secretive little shit, huh?"

"That's right," Dad agreed, taking a sip of his Sam Adams and replacing it in the cup holder. "Didn't even tell us when he went running away to college. Broke his mother's heart, he did."

Ryan winced; Chelsea winced too but didn't say anything. "I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to call," he lied. "I really didn't have the time at all."

"Hey," Eddie said, suddenly. "Where's Shannon?"

He had known it was coming, but he'd hoped it would have come a little later in the evening. Maybe after he had had a chance to have a beer himself. "Well. We're actually getting divorced, so she didn't come back to Boston with me."

That shocked them all into silence, and everyone's eyes turned slowly to him.

Finally, Dad said, "Divorced?"

Ryan wondered whether he could get away with not talking about it at all. He was still standing in the middle of the room like he was facing a judge and jury, arrayed in the half circle around his father. "She wasn't happy. I wasn't happy. It's probably better this way." As he said it, he was surprised to find that it was true: he hadn't been happy, in god knew how long.

"Divorced," Dad muttered. "Divorced! I never thought I'd live to see the day that a child of mine was getting divorced."

"Mark," Chelsea said, "be kind. I'm sure Ryan's very upset about it."

"He doesn't seem very upset about it, Chelsea."

Ryan glanced at his watch. He probably had to suffer through another hour or two of this, and then he could go. It was like this every time he came home, and every time he thought maybe it would be different, his family proved him wrong. Well: he didn't have a choice. He was here now, and they weren't going anywhere. Ryan took a seat on the couch, as far from Dad as he could get, and prepared to be grilled.

Guess where I am , he texted Shannon, even though he knew it was a bad idea. Being back here made him miss her, the solidarity they'd had even in that very specific misery. All your favorite people are here.

Don't talk to me unless I reach out first. Or go through my lawyer. You have her contact info , Shannon responded almost immediately.

Ryan sighed, locked his phone, and looked down at his hands. It was stupid to have hoped she'd still be there when he needed her: she wasn't his wife anymore, even if they hadn't signed the papers yet, and it was at least 95% his fault that she wasn't. The realization was unpleasant, along with the realization that he'd been avoiding thinking about it as much as he could.

That was it, though: he was alone, and he was at home with his family. There'd be no getting out of it now.