Page 6 of Center Ice
If there’s a chance that Graham is my kid, then I deserve to know, and to know why the hell she didn’t tell me.
“Wait,” I bark out the demand as I stand quickly. It’s only when I look down at her that I realize I’m much closer now, so I soften my voice. I don’t want to spook her like before. “We need to talk.”
“We really don’t,” she says as she squeezes Graham to her side.
“We do.” My whole reality just shifted, and while I haven’t even had time to process it yet, I’ll be damned if we’re not discussing this—that’s non-negotiable. “And we can either do it here, now, or you can give me your number and we can talk later. But we will be talking.”
“You can get my number from Lauren,” she says. “We’re leaving.”
“I’ll call you tonight,” I promise. “Make sure you answer your phone.”
A scoff bursts out of her so quickly it seems to surprise us both. “Oh, like you did all those times I called you when you moved to Vancouver?”
“Audrey...” I say, hoping I can placate her. I was a stupid twenty-two-year-old who’d just been drafted into the NHL.
“Don’t ‘Audrey’ me,” she says. “I will answer my phone if I can. And if not, I’ll call you back. That’s what people normally do when someone’s left them a message. Or twenty.” Now she sounds pissed off, and she spins on her heel and heads toward the front door with a blonde woman I hadn’t even noticed hot on her heels.
“Who was that, Mommy?” Graham asks when they make it to the front door.
“He’s no one,” Audrey replies right before the door shuts behind them.
Ouch.
With my stomach in my throat, I turn around, and my eyes meet Lauren’s. I hope she can’t tell how upset I am right now.
What is Audrey talking about? What twenty messages? I vaguely remember that she called me a few times and left a couple of messages. But I had a lot going on that first year in Vancouver, and I ignored her calls because I needed to make a clean break from my life back in Boston—I couldn’t handle anything else on my plate. But twenty messages? I don’t remember that. I’m trying to wrack my brain and remember what happened six years ago…
“You want to help me carry the s’mores supplies out, please?” Lauren asks me, shaking me from my stupor.
“Yeah, sure.”
I follow her to the kitchen island, where two large platters with graham crackers, chocolate bars, and marshmallows sit.
“So, how do you know Audrey?” I ask her as I pick up one of the platters.
She holds up her left hand so I can see her engagement ring. “Future sister-in-law.”
“Wait...Audrey is...” I try to make sense of this in my head. “She’s Jameson’s sister?”
“You didn’t know that?”
“I had no idea.”
“Weren’t you already working with Jameson when you were playing hockey in college, with plans of him becoming your agent after you were drafted?”
That’s how it usually works with college players if they haven’t already been drafted. “Yeah,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief, “but I didn’t know Audrey was his sister.”
Getting a girl pregnant in college is bad enough, but my agent’s little sister? How did I not know they were related? How did I not know she was pregnant?
Fuck…I’ve not even been back in Boston for a full day, and I’ve already seriously screwed up. Or I guess I screwed up years ago, but I just didn’t know it.
“Did she know Jameson was going to be your agent?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember if I ever mentioned it specifically, but it was definitely public knowledge.”
“How did you and Audrey know each other, again?” she asks with curiosity.
She obviously knows we know each other from college, but maybe Audrey didn’t tell her anything aside from that? “She tutored me.” I’m tempted to ask her for more details about Audrey and Graham, but if I have a kid, it really feels like the type of thing I should talk to Audrey about directly.
