Excerpt
Prologue
MARI
The lilies are on the front step when I unlock the building at 5:40, which is my first clue that something happened to me overnight.
Nobody leaves flowers at an ice rink. People leave skates their kids outgrew. Not two dozen white lilies in cellophane with a card stapled to the bow: Felicidades from the Rodriguez family, we knew he was a good one.
I have never met the Rodriguez family, and I can’t think of a single he they could mean.
My phone has an idea. It’s been buzzing in my back pocket since I parked, and when I finally look, standing on the front step with my arms full of somebody else’s congratulations, the screen says two hundred and six notifications.
The first one is from Daniela. It’s a screenshot.
It’s the photo from Thursday: me and the captain of the Austin Sidewinders at center ice under the Guadalupe, shaking hands like two people who just agreed on a price for a used truck. Under it, the team’s caption. Our captain and his partner at the Vega Ice House. A heart.
Partner. One. Somewhere downtown, in an office with very good coffee, somebody cut an S.
The second notification is ESPN. Sidewinders captain Beck Sorensen appears to be engaged.
Appears to be. I read it three times, the way I read permit letters, looking for the clause that gets me out. There isn’t one. There’s a picture of a ring somebody found on Pinterest. There are four thousand comments. One is from my tía Lupe, and it’s eleven crying faces in a row.
The third is from my mother. ¿¿MARISOL??
The lilies smell like a wedding and a funeral at the same time, which is the whole problem with lilies. A man walking his dog on the other side of Cesar Chavez slows down to look at me, and then at the flowers, and smiles like he knows something.
He knows more than I do.
I’m thirty-one years old. I run an ice rink. I have spent maybe forty minutes total in the company of Beck Sorensen, and eleven seconds of that was a handshake.
I hide the lilies in the Zamboni bay, where nobody will see them, and I’m still standing there when the phone rings.
Preston Holt. At 6:52 on a Sunday morning.
I already know what he’s going to ask me. I just don’t know yet what I’m going to say.
