Chapter 87: Confronting Darcy

POV: Georgia

I bring up hockey history like it’s small talk, and I watch his whole face change.

I’ve been thinking about how to do this for two days, turning the words over in my head until they lost all meaning, until they sounded like nothing at all. I can’t just ask Darcy outright if he knows what happened to his brother. He’d know instantly that I’ve been digging, and worse, he’d know I’ve started wondering about him instead of just Puck. So I decide to make it sound like nothing. A passing comment. The kind of thing you say when you’re only half paying attention, when your mind is somewhere else entirely and the words just slip out.

I find him after my last class, sitting on the low wall outside the library with his jacket collar turned up against the wind. The sky has gone the color of old bruises, purple bleeding into gray, and the air smells like rain that hasn’t decided to fall yet. He smiles when he sees me limping over, cane tapping against the stone path, and shifts to make room.

"There she is," he says, warm and teasing. "How’s the knee?"

"Same as yesterday." I sit down next to him, careful with my leg, and let out a breath like the walk actually tired me out, which it kind of did. The cold seeps through my jacket, settles into the ache behind my kneecap. "How was practice?"

"Brutal. Coach ran us into the ground." He stretches his legs out in front of him, boots scuffed and damp at the toes. "You look tired."

"I am." I let a beat pass, long enough that it feels natural, like the next thing I say is just wherever my tired brain happens to land. "I was actually up late reading old hockey articles. Don’t ask me why. I think I’ve officially run out of things to distract myself with."

"Hockey articles." He raises an eyebrow, amused, his mouth curving into something crooked. "That’s a new low, even for you."

"I know." I laugh a little, and it comes out easier than I expect, almost real. "There was this whole thing about a collision a couple years ago. Ended some guy’s career. I don’t even really follow hockey, I just went down a rabbit hole."

I watch him while I say it. I don’t stare. I’ve gotten better at that, at looking at someone without seeming like I’m looking, at keeping my face soft and my eyes half lidded like I’m bored instead of waiting.

"Yeah?" he says, light and easy, exactly the same as it’s been the whole conversation.

"Yeah. Dominic Valentine." I say the name plainly, like it’s just a name, like it doesn’t mean anything to me at all, like I haven’t said it in my head a hundred times since I found it.

For one second, everything about him goes still.

It isn’t dramatic. If I weren’t watching so closely, I don’t think I’d catch it at all. His smile doesn’t drop. His posture doesn’t change. But something underneath all of it, something in his eyes, goes cold and flat and hard, like a light switching off behind a curtain that’s still hanging in the same place. His jaw tightens, just barely, just for that one second, and the easy warmth that usually sits behind his eyes disappears completely. The wind picks up, rattling the bare branches above us, and for a moment it’s the only sound between us.

It’s the first time since I’ve known him that I’ve seen him not fully in control of his own face.

Then it’s gone. The smile stays exactly where it was the whole time, and his shoulders relax back into the same lazy slouch against the wall, and if I’d blinked, I would have missed the whole thing.

"Old news," he says, almost bored, waving a hand like he’s brushing away a fly. "Some hockey thing from a while back. I don’t really keep up with it."

"Right." I nod slowly, tracing the edge of my cane with my thumb. "Weird story, though. The article said the hit was, like, unusually aggressive. Out of nowhere."

"Hockey players get aggressive," he says with a shrug, his voice carrying the flatness of someone reciting a line they’ve said too many times. "That’s kind of the sport."

"I guess." I let it drop, easy, like I’ve already lost interest, tucking my hands into my sleeves against the cold. "Anyway. Not important. I just thought it was a strange thing to stumble on at one in the morning."

"You need better hobbies," he says, grinning, the warmth flooding back into his face, exactly the one I’ve seen a hundred times before. "Reading old sports injuries instead of sleeping. That’s a red flag, Georgia."

"Probably," I say, and I make myself laugh again, the sound thin in the cold air.

"You know what you actually need?" he says, nudging my shoulder with his, playful now, all trace of that stillness erased. "Sleep. Actual sleep. Not one a.m. internet spirals about strangers’ knee surgeries."

"Says the guy who probably watches game tape until three."

"That’s different. That’s professional development." He says it with mock seriousness, chin lifted, and I almost forget, for half a breath, what I just watched happen behind his eyes.

We keep talking after that, about nothing, about the wind and his practice and whether the dining hall is ever going to bring back the good bread. He complains about the soggy fries with real, wounded outrage, and I let myself laugh at that too, because it’s easy, because he makes it easy. He’s exactly the same as he always is, charming and easy and quick with a joke. If I hadn’t been watching so carefully in that one second, I would walk away from this conversation thinking nothing had happened at all.

But I was watching. And something happened.

I think about it the whole walk back to my dorm, cane tapping slow against the stone path, my leg aching with every step, the cold biting at my knuckles where I grip the handle too tight. I think about the way his voice stayed exactly the same while his eyes went somewhere else entirely, somewhere dark and locked and far away from the boy laughing beside me. I think about how fast he covered it, how practiced the recovery was, like he’s spent years sharpening that particular skill.

Old news, he said. But old news doesn’t make someone go that still. Old news doesn’t need a recovery that smooth.

Back in my room, I sit on my bed with my notebook open in my lap, the lamp throwing a small yellow circle over the page. I flip past the two columns, past the circle around his name from weeks ago, past the pages of scattered evidence I’ve been collecting since the day I arrived, ink smudged in places where my hand shook.

I find a blank space at the bottom of the page and I write it slowly, pressing the pen down hard enough that I can feel it through the paper, hard enough that the letters nearly tear through to the next.

*Darcy is not just interested in me. Darcy has a reason.*