Total pages in book: 24
Estimated words: 22495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 112(@200wpm)___ 90(@250wpm)___ 75(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 22495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 112(@200wpm)___ 90(@250wpm)___ 75(@300wpm)
He was just a man whose wife of seven years was about to leave him for good, and he was not the kind of man to just accept it without a fight.
“Laina.”
And so he cut her off.
“I want you to say all of those things to my face.”
She managed to turn to his direction. But her gaze only got as far as his collarbone, the place where she used to press her mouth when he came to bed late after a road game, half-asleep and reaching for him in the dark because Laina reached for people even when they pushed her away.
Even when they forgot to reach back.
"I...”
His fists clenched. He prepared himself to hear the words all over again—
“I d-don’t love you anymore.”
But instead, his young wife succeeded in doing something that his opponents had always said was impossible to do, and that was to catch Troy completely off guard.
Did Laina just say...she no longer loved him?
He stared at her.
Saw the way she had paled.
And he just...
He just couldn’t tell.
This wife he had once thought—arrogantly, he now realized—he knew inside and out...was now someone whose words had become something he couldn’t discern. And it made him suddenly think...he really might lose her for good.
Troy wanted to say something.
But for the life of him, he just didn’t know what to say.
And when she sensed that he was about to speak—
Laina suddenly ducked under his arm, and a moment later, she was gone, the front door closing behind her.
And Troy...
It was as if he was frozen in place as he listened to her car start in the driveway, the engine sound getting smaller and smaller until the house was quiet in a way it had never been quiet before. Not empty quiet, but gone quiet, the kind that gnawed at Troy all the way to his soul.
He slowly looked around him. On the wall opposite the kitchen, the framed photo from his retirement ceremony still hung where Laina had insisted on putting it. Troy at center ice in The Res, the Waymakers' arena, with the crowd on their feet and Old Goldie's voice cracking over the speakers as he said, And that's the last shift for the greatest player this franchise has ever seen. Laina had cried harder than anyone that night. He remembered that now.
He saw the cabinet door she'd left open swung in the draft. The divorce papers on the counter, and her signature on it, which didn’t resemble at all the tiny, pretty mess of scrawled lines he was more familiar with.
Her signature on the divorce paper looked like she had spent hours on it. Like every line...made his wife bleed.
He put the papers down.
He had to.
The next thing that drew his attention was her mug. The Mrs. B one. She didn’t go anywhere without it. The one time he had asked her if she would like to replace it with a newer and expensive one, Laina had looked at him, aghast. This is the first thing I owned as your wife. I would never part with it.
And yet...
She had left it behind her now.
Troy set the mug down and looked at the staff badge. Her photo beamed up at him: Laina Blackett, Kindergarten Teacher, mid-laugh, hair falling into one eye. The Laina in this photo was the Laina he had met the first time. Beautiful. Innocent. Optimistic. And as he stared at her photo, his mind slowly drifted to the past.
He remembered what she impishly insisted on calling their ‘meet-cute’, mostly because she loved seeing his pained expression every time she did so. And as for their so-called ‘meet-cute’, it was when at a hockey game he had attended as a spectator, way up in the bleachers, and she hadn’t recognized him at all. She had accidentally dumped an entire tray of nachos into his lap, and even to this day, he recalled how her face had completely turned red like cherries.
“I am so, so sorry, I'm not usually—I mean, I guess I’m usually this clumsy, but not usually onto people, and you have cheese on your—oh no, it's everywhere, I'm so—"
He'd handed her a napkin. She'd used it on his shirt instead of her own hands. Three weeks after that, he had proposed, they had their secret courthouse wedding, and on their wedding night, she had somehow ended up wearing one of his old shirts, and he remembered thinking, Mine.
Seeing her in his shirt, that was when it had hit him.
This beautiful, innocent girl whose smile could light up even the darkest of nights...
She was his.
That first night, she had babbled like usual, her words only stuttering to a stop when his hands curved around her waist, and her fingers ended up curling into the front of his shirt.
Her eyes had been big and dazed when they met his, her words spilling out in a whisper.