“Did you purposely make him believe something that wasn’t true?”
“Okay, fine, I lied and it was a really stupid choice. Listen, Emmalee. I didn’t call to worry you or make you feel like you needed to solve this. I just called to see if you would commiserate with me. So… commiserate with me?”
There was a long pause. “Emmalee?”
Still nothing, so Katie looked at her phone. The screen was black. She tapped on it a few times, but it still didn’t light up. She pressed the power button, but nothing. She held it down, and theNo batterysymbol lit up. “No!” How could it have died without her noticing that it was getting low on power? Then she remembered that freezing temperatures drained a phone battery faster.
It was okay. She would just keep getting out every thirty minutes or so to make sure the area behind the exhaust was clear of snow. Then she’d try to wait fifteen minutes between each time she turned the car on to blast the furnace so the gas would last as long as possible. It would be a very long night, but she could get help in the morning.
It turned out that she couldn’t wait fifteen minutes between each time she turned on the car, though. Her boots, socks, the bottom half of her pants, her gloves, and the bottom half of her coat sleeves were so wet from trying to clear the snow, and it made her so cold. Her hood was pretty wet, too.
Why had she not just called Connor while she had the chance?
She shivered as she pulled the blanket tighter, and then she petted Biscuit again. “We’re going to make it through this, little guy. We’ll be okay.” She just needed to keep saying it, and it would be true.
eighteen
CONNOR
Connor couldn’t believehow dense he’d been to ask Katie her opinion on him putting in a trade request. He should’ve expected that she would look at it through the lens of the two of them. When he’d said that it wasn’t about her, he’d meant that his wanting to go had nothing to do with her. Now that he was looking at it from her perspective, he understood that she took it to mean that she didn’t make a difference in his wanting to stay.
He wished he could rewind the night and try again. Actually, that he could rewind the previous day and a half. Between going to Charlotte, playing such a rough game against his old team, and seeing his dad again in the same city where he was living, he had been just throwing so many things in the “Why I should leave” column in his head.
Of course, he put Katie on the “Why I should stay” side. But his focus had been on the longer side— the one with the fresh emotions he’d been experiencing in quick succession. What he should’ve been asking himself was “Could I handle being traded away from Katie?” The answer to that was an unequivocalNo. He had no interest in being away from her. If he hadn’t lost perspective so much and just asked himself that question from the start, he wouldn’t have dwelt on everything else. It all would’ve fallen away as insignificant.
He stayed up and worried about Katie until he got the text from her saying that she made it home. But as much as he tried, he still couldn’t fall asleep. At one point, he considered calling Vaughan, or even Erik, just so he could talk through everything. But he wasn’t about to call them in the middle of the night. Especially on Christmas Eve, and especially because they both had wives whom he would also be waking up with his call.
Eventually, he must’ve fallen asleep because he woke from dreaming about ice melting under his skates to the sound of a phone call. He reached for the phone, disoriented and clumsy. But he managed to pry his eyes open to see that the screen showed a time of 3:11 a.m. and a phone call from the nameEmmalee. It took a moment for his brain to wake up and realize it was Katie’s friend. When he’d stopped at the flower shop to get Katie’s address, they had swapped phone numbers in case he couldn’t find their apartment.
As soon as he answered the phone, Emmalee said, “Katie is stuck in the snow.”
He sat up straight. “What? Isn’t she home?”
“Nope! She’s stubborn and stuck on the side of the road with a dog.”
‘With a dog?” He put the phone on speaker so he could start changing.
“Apparently a really cute one that she rescued and is calling Biscuit. We have our locations shared with each other, so when she first told me she was stuck, I went in to see where she was and took a screenshot. I’m texting it to you now. Before our conversation was over, the line went dead. I don’t know if there’s a problem with cell reception because of the storm, or if her battery died, or what. And I’m at my parents in Lakewood and I-seventy is closed, so I can’t get there to help.”
He’d changed into pants, put on socks, and checked to make sure that he got the screenshot. Then he said, “No, stay where you are. I’m going to go to her. I’ll keep you updated.”
After taking two steps toward his door, he went back and grabbed the pajama pants he’d just taken off and an extra pair of socks. Then he rushed to the home’s front door and put on the boots he bought just a day ago in anticipation of this storm, tucking his pants into them. Then he put on his coat, gloves, and hat, grabbed his keys, and went outside.
A snow shovel was leaning against the garage door, so he grabbed it, tossed it into his back seat, and started driving toward where the map said Katie was.
The roads were so much worse now than when Katie had left. Even with chains on his tires, he worried he wouldn’t make it through some parts. It was just so deep. The going was slow, but he made sure not to come to a complete stop anywhere.
The road he was coming up to hadn’t been plowed as recently as the one he was on, and he worried about the extra depth. He glanced at the map to see if there was any alternate road he could take to get him from where he was to the dot where Katie was, but he couldn’t see any other options. So he turned onto it.
His car felt so much more bogged down. He kept his speed steady, making sure he wasn’t pushing on the gas too much. His tires were still turning, likely only because of the chains.
And then suddenly they weren’t.
He tried giving the car a little bit of gas and then tried to get it rocking back and forth to compress the snow around the tires enough to get some traction, but it was no use. The snow was just too deep. After putting the car into park, he pulled off a glove, grabbed his phone, and looked at the screenshot. Katie had to be only about a block and a half away from him. He could walk to her, but simply getting to her wasn’t enough. She needed to be someplace warm, and there was no way to drive.
There weren’t any houses nearby, and this area didn’t seem familiar to him at all. It could be because everything was covered in snow so nothing looked normal. He switched out of the screenshot and went into a GPS map on his phone where he could look at a bigger area or zoom in.
He looked between the map and his surroundings. Currently, he was about a block away from a cross street, and Katie was not far from the corner going right. Going left at that corner and about a block down, though, was the rink he used to practice at as a teen when he lived in Mountain Springs. He swiped over to his phone’s contacts— maybe he still had the owner’s contact information. The man used to let him practice in the early mornings before they opened and just hid a key outside for him.
