"Don't—" I was too late. He'd already lifted one of them, turning it over in his hands like he was examining a fossil.
The smell hit me immediately. It was the scent of old leather. For a heartbeat, I was nineteen again, sitting in Derek's truck behind the Whistleport Ice Arena, my hands shaking as I worked the laces tight. The memories flooded into my mind.
Derek's truck. Graduation night. The bottle in his hand catching light from a streetlamp as we hit the coast road too fast.
The curve came out of nowhere.
I woke up in Eastern Maine Medical Center three days later with a shattered kneecap, two broken ribs, and parents who looked like they'd aged a decade in seventy-two hours.
Derek was in the room next door, unconscious, his left arm in a cast that went from his fingertips to his shoulder. He never went home.
The scholarship was gone before I was even discharged. The university sent a polite letter explaining that they couldn't risk their investment on someone who'd already demonstrated poor judgment.
Two local boys. Underage drinking. Reckless driving. One lucky to be alive.
My parents didn't say much during those first few weeks. I saw it in their faces—the disappointment, the fear, the sudden understanding that their son wasn't the golden child they'd thought he was. The boy who'd gotten a full ride to college had become the boy who'd thrown it all away for a joyride and a bottle of beer.
The knee healed wrong, leaving me with a permanent limp and chronic pain that flared up every time the weather changed. Soon after that, my parents left, and my aunt blamed me—for Derek.
I was eighteen when the accident happened. Shortly after my nineteenth birthday, Margaret Sinclair helped me escape to Ironhook, a refuge from the cruel, judgmental reality of the mainland
And the skates—the last pair I'd ever owned, the ones I'd been planning to take to college—sat under that bench like evidence of a crime I couldn't quite remember committing.
Eric's voice cut through my memories. "You were good, weren't you?"
I blinked and was back in my cottage on Ironhook Island, watching a college kid examine the remnants of a life I'd left behind when he was in first grade.
"Put those down."
Eric looked up, startled by the edge in my tone, but he didn't drop the skates. Instead, he cradled them, understanding they were somehow fragile.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"
"I said put those down."
This time, he did, pushing the skates back under the bench with gentle pressure. He didn't move away and didn't pretend he hadn't seen what he'd seen.
He spoke softly. "People don't keep broken things unless they matter."
I stared at him, the bright-eyed kid who'd been in my house for less than twenty-four hours and already thought he understood something about my life. The urge to explain—to tell him about the scholarship and the accident—rose in my throat like bile.
Instead, I turned and walked out of the cottage, letting the screen door slam behind me hard enough to rattle the frame.
Outside, the fog was rolling back in from the east, gray and thick and familiar. I walked the perimeter of the cottage without any particular destination in mind, checking fence posts that didn't need checking and examining foundation stones that had been solid for a century and would be solid for another.
The sea stretched out before me, endless and disinterested, as it had done for sixteen years. It didn't care about hockey scholarships or car accidents or how a man could disappear so completely that even he forgot who he used to be.
I made three circuits around the cottage before the screen door opened behind me.
"Wes?"
Eric's voice was tentative as if he were tiptoeing through a minefield. I kept walking, focusing on the rhythm of my boots against the worn path.
"Wes, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have—"
I stopped abruptly. "No, you shouldn't have."
He stood there with his hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets, looking like a kid caught rifling through someone's diary.
