Prologue
Kendall
Two Years Ago
The concrete foundation of the arena vibrated against the soles of my sneakers, a low, rhythmic thrumming that felt less like sound and more like a physical presence. Even back here, buried deep within the bowels of the stadium where the air smelled of stale ice, industrial disinfectant, and damp gear, there was no escaping it. The walls couldn't contain it. The heavy, fire-rated doors couldn't choke it out.
The crowd was chanting his name.
*Hayes. Hayes. Hayes.*
Thousands of voices moving in a terrifying, synchronized cadence that made the dust motes dance in the harsh fluorescent light above my head. It was a suffocating sound, a wall of pure adoration.
Usually, it was the kind of sound that made something warm and fiercely protective bloom right beneath my ribs. On any other night, hearing them scream for him would have brought a stupid, helpless smile to my face, because I possessed the one thing none of those people in the stands ever would: I knew the boy behind the jersey. I knew the version of Brennan Hayes that didn't exist under the blinding glare of the stadium rafters. I knew the boy who routinely ate cheap cereal out of literal mixing bowls because regular dishes required too many refills. I knew the exact, heavy weight of his jaw resting on my shoulder, and the way he’d press a slow, lingering kiss to the sensitive curve of my neck when he was fishing for forgiveness. I had a digital graveyard of blurry, ridiculous selfies he’d sent from the back of team buses at three in the morning, always accompanied by some text claiming the horrific overhead lighting made him look "tragically handsome."
He was ridiculous. He was impossible. He was entirely, unreservedly mine.
At least, he had been when we woke up this morning.
My phone gave a sharp, violent buzz against my palm, the sudden vibration startling a jagged breath from my lungs. I didn't even need to look at the screen. I’d already stared at the glowing text six times until the words had burned themselves into my retina, but my thumb swiped the glass anyway.
> **Brennan:** Need to see you.
>
Four words.
There was no playful banter. No teasing emoji. No trailing question asking where his good luck kiss was before he took the ice. Just a flat, sterile command that felt entirely alien coming from him.
A cold, greasy knot of anxiety twisted deep in my stomach, but I clamped down on it, forcing myself to take another step forward down the labyrinth of cinderblock hallways. I was overthinking. I had to be. The stakes tonight had been astronomical; he’d just dropped a game-winning goal in the final thirty seconds of the third period, right in front of a row of NHL scouts who had spent the last three months dissecting his every move. He was probably just drowning in adrenaline. Brennan always went quiet when the noise around him got too loud. It was a defense mechanism—he retreated inward to find his bearings. I knew that about him.
I knew every single one of his silences. I knew the topography of his moods better than my own.
Or, God help me, I thought I did.
I rounded the final corner near the locker rooms, and the breath died completely in my throat.
He was standing near the end of the corridor, framed by the ugly, institutional wash of the overhead lights. He was only half-undressed from the game—the heavy black hockey pants still hung from his hips, paired with the sweat-wicking compression shirt that clung to the broad, hard lines of his shoulders. His dark hair was a mess of damp, unruly curls that clung to his forehead, dripping slightly against his skin. His varsity-striped jersey was clamped tight in his right fist, the fabric bunched up so hard his knuckles were stark white.
But it was his jaw that made my blood run cold. It was locked so tight I could see the muscle ticking violently beneath his skin. Before he even opened his mouth, a heavy, suffocating dread settled over my chest.
My pace slowed, my sneakers dragging against the scuffed floor. “Hey,” I said softly, the syllable sounding fragile against the distant roar of the stadium.
His eyes lifted.
And there it was. The thing I had spent the last ten minutes desperately trying not to name.
It was an expression I had never seen on his face in the three years we’d been together. It wasn't the look of a guy who was tired, or stressed about scouts, or irritated by a bad call from a referee. This wasn't an external problem.
This was us. This was an ending.
“What happened?” I asked, my voice dropping an octave, losing its softness, turning sharp with sudden panic.
His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard, his chest rising and falling in a ragged rhythm. “Nothing.”
“Brennan.”
He looked away. He actually shifted his weight and let his gaze drop to the scuffed concrete floor.
That single, cowardly movement terrified me more than anything else could have. Brennan Hayes didn't look away from me. It didn't matter if we were in the middle of a screaming match, or if he was whispering an apology into my hair in the dark, or if he was tracking me across a packed, suffocating house party with that slow, wicked smirk that made my knees completely give out. When it came to me, he was always entirely present. His focus was always absolute.
But right now, he couldn't even look me in the eye.
“We need to talk,” he said.
The words were low, raspy from shouting on the ice, but they hit me like a physical blow. My lungs seized, a tight, agonizing band wrapping around my ribs until it genuinely hurt to draw air. I hated those words. They were such small, unassuming pieces of vocabulary, but when strung together in that exact sequence, they became a weapon. A diagnostic tool meant to slice open something healthy and declare it dead.
“Okay,” I whispered, the word tasting like ash.
He dragged his free hand through his damp curls, the jersey in his other hand rustling loudly as he glanced back toward the heavy double doors of the locker room. From behind the wood, the muffled sounds of his team erupted—guys shouting, bass vibrating from a Bluetooth speaker, metal sticks clattering against the floor as they celebrated a massive win like the entire world hadn't just tilted completely off its axis beneath my feet.
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately,” he began, his voice flat, devoid of the cadence that usually made me feel safe.
A sharp, hysterical laugh slipped past my lips before I could stop it. “That already sounds fucking horrible.”
His mouth twitched at the corners, a micro-expression that looked like he wanted to smile, to break the tension, to step forward and wrap his arms around me and tell me he was just messing with me. For one beautiful, incredibly stupid second, I let myself believe it. I let myself think that he was just rattled. That he was going to tell me he was terrified of the future, that the scouts had cornered him, or that he just needed me to take him somewhere quiet where the world couldn't reach him.
But then the warmth vanished, and his features settled back into a hard, unreadable mask.
“I mean it, Kendall.”
The coldness in his tone made me instinctively wrap my arms around my middle, my fingers burrowing deep into the oversized sleeves of the heavy cotton hoodie I was wearing.
*His* hoodie.
The dark gray one with his last name and number faded across the back, the one he’d practically forced me into after our very first date because the autumn air had turned crisp and he’d muttered, with that stupid, arrogant grin, that he liked the look of his name on my skin. I had lived in it ever since.
“Then just say it,” I demanded, my voice hardening as the fear began to morph into a desperate, defensive anger. “Stop dragging it out.”
Brennan just stared at me. The silence stretched between us, thick and suffocating, lasting a second too long, then two, then three.
And in that prolonged quiet, the truth crystallized. I didn't need him to articulate it. The knowledge descended on me like a physical weight, crushing the air out of my chest.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said.
The hallway felt like it dropped into a vacuum. The distant roar of the crowd, the bass thumping through the locker room doors, the echo of footsteps further down the corridor—it all vanished, replaced by a high-pitched ringing in my ears.
I blinked at him, my brain stubbornly refusing to process the syntax of the sentence. “What?”
“You and me,” he said, his voice dropping lower, completely steady now, which somehow made it a thousand times worse. “I can’t keep trying to balance all of this, Kendall.”
*All of this.*
The phrase felt like a slap. Like our relationship was a ledger he was trying to balance. Like I was an extra piece of heavy luggage he was forced to drag through an airport. Like loving me, after everything we had built, was nothing more than an inconvenient weight he had to carry.
I took a step backward before my brain even registered that my legs were moving, creating distance between us because the sheer mass of him suddenly felt dangerous. “You’re breaking up with me?”
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t blink. He just stood there, his chest heaving under the compression shirt, letting the silence answer for him. It was the coward's way out, letting the absence of a denial do the heavy lifting.
My heart didn't just break; it felt like it shattered with a violent, internal crack so loud I was genuinely shocked he didn't flinch from the impact.
“You said you loved me,” I whispered, the words sounding pathetic, like a child begging for a toy that had been taken away. “You told me that two days ago.”
His eyes snapped back to mine, a sudden, dark fire igniting in them. “I do love you.”
“Then what the fuck is this, Brennan?” I yelled, the anger finally tearing through the paralysis. “What are you doing?”
His jaw worked, a muscle jumping violently near his ear. “You deserve more than this life. You deserve someone who can actually be there.”
I stared at him, completely incredulous, and then another laugh tore out of me. It was a hideous, broken sound, raw and scraped thin at the edges. “Don’t.”
His brows pulled together, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t make it sound noble,” I spat, my voice shaking so violently I had to clench my teeth to keep them from chattering. I hated the weakness of it. I hated that I was unraveling while he stood there like a stone statue. “Don’t stand there and completely rip my heart out of my chest while trying to pretend you’re doing me a goddamn favor.”
A flicker of genuine pain flashed across his face, his eyes tightening at the corners.
*Good*, I thought bitterly. *Good.* I wanted it to hurt him. I wanted him to bleed, even if it was just a fraction of the total, catastrophic ruin currently tearing through my veins.
“Kendall—”
“No,” I said, shaking my head fiercely as the first hot, humiliating tears began to burn behind my eyelids. I blinked them back, refusing to let them fall in front of him. “No, you don’t get to talk. Because I have stood by you through every single piece of this. Every miserable five-morning practice, every grueling road trip, every single time hockey came first, I stepped back and I understood. I never complained. Not once.”
His mouth parted slightly, his chest rising as if he wanted to interrupt, but no sound came out.
“I rearranged my entire college schedule around your games,” I continued, the words tumbling out in a furious, suffocating rush. “I sat in freezing, miserable arenas until my fingers were blue. I celebrated every single one of your wins like they were my own, and I held you in the dark through every single loss when you couldn't even speak. I loved you through all of it, Brennan. Unconditionally. And now, what? Now that things are actually getting serious, I’m suddenly too much?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” he growled, taking a sharp half-step toward me, his hand reaching out instinctively.
“It’s exactly what I’m hearing.”
“Baby, listen to me—”
“Don’t call me that.”
The words cut through the air like a razor blade, sharper and meaner than I had ever intended.
Brennan stopped dead in his tracks, his extended hand dropping heavily back to his side as if I had physically struck him. For a split second, his mask completely shattered. His face did something awful—it crumpled into something so raw, so utterly devastated and broken, that a part of me wanted to instantly take it back. A part of me wanted to scream that I was sorry, to reach out and bridge the distance between us.
Almost.
But the reality remained. He was still standing there. He was still the one driving the knife in. He was still actively choosing this outcome.
He was choosing hockey.
“You know what the most messed-up part of this is?” I asked, using the back of my hand to fiercely wipe away a stray tear that had escaped down my cheek, furious at my own body for betraying me. “I actually thought tonight was going to be special. I thought we were going to celebrate.”
His eyes closed tightly for a long beat, his long lashes casting dark shadows against his cheekbones.
“There were NHL scouts out there tonight,” I said, my voice dropping to a harsh, mocking whisper. “The entire arena was chanting your name. You scored the game-winning goal. You got everything you ever fucking wanted, Brennan.”
His features tightened further, his face twisting as if he were in physical agony.
And that was the exact moment the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. The cold, hard truth settled deep into my bones, gutting me completely.
I wasn't a part of his "everything" anymore. I was a liability. I was the extraneous weight that had to be systematically cut away so that the rest of his dream could fit into the narrow, suffocating space of professional sports.
“So that’s it?” I asked, the realization making my knees feel like water. “You get close to your dream, you finally get within arm's reach of the NHL, and I’m the very first thing you let go of?”
His eyes snapped open. They were darker than I’d ever seen them, the deep green swallowed entirely by his pupils, turning them nearly black with a dangerous, volatile emotion.
“You think this is fucking easy for me?” he demanded, his voice dropping into a rough, gravelly register that vibrated with suppressed rage.
“No,” I said, my voice barely carrying over the distance between us, reduced to a hollow, breathless whisper. “I think you’re making it easy by pretending you don’t have a choice in the matter.”
His breathing changed instantly. It turned rougher, heavier, the sound of a man backing into a corner. It was anger, or maybe it was just a defense mechanism against the sheer amount of hurt he was trying to suppress.
“I don’t know how to be what you need me to be, Kendall,” he said, his voice cracking slightly on my name, the sound of it tearing at my nerve endings. “And still be what *they* need me to be, too.”
“They?” I asked, a bitter edge returning to my tone. “The scouts? The front office? Your agent? Your coach?”
He didn’t answer. He just stared at me, his silence a heavy, damning admission.
I nodded slowly, even though every single organ inside my body felt like it was collapsing under the pressure of a dying star. “Right. Of course.”
“Kendall, please.”
“Say it,” I whispered, stepping closer to him, driven by a strange, reckless bravery that only comes when you have absolutely nothing left to lose. I wanted the execution to be clean. I didn't want any pretty lies to cling to later in the dark. “Say it, Brennan. Say what you actually mean. Give me the real words.”
His chest rose and fell in one final, ragged heave. When he spoke, his voice was so rough it sounded like it was tearing his throat apart.
“I need to focus on hockey.”
There it was.
Six words. That was the entirety of the execution order. That was all it took to utterly demolish three years of history, of shared promises, of a future we had mapped out on late-night drives.
I felt the words land somewhere deep and permanent, branding themselves onto my soul. For a terrifying moment, my throat locked and I couldn't draw a single breath of air. The world spinning around me felt completely gray.
Then, a strange, crystalline coldness washed over me, replacing the panic, replacing the heat of the anger. It was the numbness of shock, and it was a mercy.
Without a word, I pulled my arms out of the long, oversized sleeves of his hoodie. I reached down, grabbed the thick elastic hem with both hands, and violently yanked it over my head in one fluid motion.
The heavy fabric dragged against my face, static electricity lifting my hair into a wild halo around my head. The cool, stagnant air of the arena hallway hit the bare skin of my arms and collarbone, raising instant goosebumps, but I didn't care. I didn't feel the cold.
Brennan’s eyes tracked the movement, dropping to the gray bundle of fabric now clutched in my hands as if I were holding a corpse.
I stepped into his personal space, breaching the boundary one last time, and shoved the heavy sweatshirt hard against his chest.
His hands moved automatically, his fingers curling into the familiar fabric to keep it from dropping to the floor. He caught it. Of course he did. Brennan Hayes was a world-class athlete; he always caught everything. Pucks flying at eighty miles an hour. Perfect, cross-ice passes. My waist when I was being clumsy and tripped over absolutely nothing in his apartment. My hand under the table at crowded restaurants when he wanted to remind me he was there. My face between his large, calloused palms right before he kissed me like he was trying to anchor his entire soul to mine.
He caught everything. Except us.
“You know what’s really funny?” I said, my voice eerily calm, though my chest was hollowed out. “I would have followed you anywhere, Brennan. It didn't matter what city, or what team, or how bad the schedule got. I would have gone.”
His face broke. Truly broke this time.
The hard, stoic mask cracked down the center, a look of pure, unadulterated devastation tearing through his features, and it only made it worse. It was a cruel reminder that he still cared, which meant this was a calculated sacrifice.
“Kendall, please don't do this,” he choked out, his fingers tightening so hard around the hoodie that the fabric groaned.
I just shook my head, stepping back out of his reach. “No. You don’t get to say please. Not after this.”
Behind him, down the long corridor, the arena seemed to erupt yet again. The glass doors rattled as another massive wave of sound washed through the concrete tunnels.
*Hayes. Hayes. Hayes.*
His name filled the stadium like a religious chant. It was the sound of his future calling out to him, demanding his absolute allegiance. It was the sound of the life he had chosen over me.
And as I stood there in the harsh, unflattering light of the hallway, looking at the boy I loved more than my own life, I realized I had given my heart to someone who would always answer that sound first.
“You made your choice,” I whispered.
Then, I turned around.
Every single step away from him felt like dragging my feet through wet cement. My muscles screamed at me to stop, to turn back, to beg. With every inch of distance I put between us, I waited for the inevitable. I waited for the heavy sound of his hockey skates or sneakers squeaking against the floor. I waited for the sudden, rough grip of his hand around my wrist, pulling me back into his chest. I waited for his voice to break the silence, blocking my exit, because in three years, Brennan Hayes had never let me walk away angry. Not once. He had always chased me.
One step. Two steps. Three steps.
The heavy fire doors at the end of the hall loomed closer. Still, there was nothing but the sound of my own shallow breathing.
I reached the corner that would take me out to the exit.
Nothing.
I hated myself for it—I despised the weak, pathetic part of me that couldn't just walk away with my dignity intact—but I stopped, and I looked back over my shoulder.
He hadn't moved an inch. He was still standing exactly where I’d left him under those buzzing fluorescent tubes, his broad shoulders hunched forward slightly, clutching my discarded hoodie against his chest like it was the only tangible piece of me he had left in the world.
For one final, agonizing breath, our eyes met across the long expanse of the concrete hallway.
And in that final look, I saw the truth. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he still loved me. It was written in the hollow line of his jaw and the bleak, empty stare in his eyes.
That was the absolute worst part of it. He loved me. He just didn't choose me.
I turned the corner, pushed through the heavy metal exit doors, and walked out into the crisp autumn night while thousands of people inside the building continued to scream his name into the rafters.
By the time the biting, cold air hit my face and the first real tear finally spilled over my lashes, I understood a fundamental truth I wished to God I didn't have to learn.
Sometimes, the person who breaks your heart doesn't do it because they stopped loving you. Sometimes, they do it simply because they love something else more.
