There’s one person in particular that I did not tell. Bryce Campeau, a center for the Brooklyn Bruisers, and the man I once believed I would marry.

He’s going to be astonished to see me standing here. If he ever looks up.

The Bruisers are clustered around their coach, listening intently. People expect big things from the Bruisers this year. It’s too early to talk of the championship, but they are well-positioned for the season. Which means I basically have a front-row seat to watch Bryce fulfill his dreams.

He stands stock sill in his skates, his whole being focused on his coach’s words. Bryce is the most serious man I’ve ever met. And when he finds out I’ve suddenly appeared in Brooklyn, he’ll—

Okay, the truth is that I’m not exactly sure what he’ll do. He and I have lots of history, but not the romantic kind. He’d lived in our family’s house throughout my teen years, billeted as a junior hockey player on one of my father’s teams.

We’d often had players living with us. They had been brash, silly boys, and I hadn’t paid them much attention. But Bryce had been different from the start. At seventeen, he’d been a man already, with a serious expression and moody, dark blue eyes. Like me, he’d had a French-speaking mother. And like my mother, he was a devout Catholic.

But Bryce was alone in the world. He never met his father. His mother tried her best to give him a good life, he’d said, but by the time he came to live with us, she had died of complications from liver disease.

“She drank. A lot,” he’d told us frankly. “She quit many times, but it got her in the end.”

So there’d been this kid, only seventeen years old when he’d arrived, and motherless. He’d been playing for an Ontario team and could barely understand his coach, or my father, who ran the program.

My mother had taken one look at his solemn face and the gold crucifix around his neck and saw a kindred spirit. She’d basically adopted him on sight. She could tell he needed someone to fuss over him—someone to make foods that he liked and organize his life and sit beside him at Mass on Sunday.

And I’d loved him from the first moment I watched his broody gaze scan my home, taking in my mother’s collection of prayer candles and the carefully set table. He’d walked over to the mantel, noticing that one of Maman’s statuettes had tipped to the side. And he carefully righted it. “Thank you for to bring me here in your home,” he’d said in very halting English.

I’d liked the soft, measured tone of his voice. And I’d really liked that he needed my help with the language. As a French speaker myself, I would often come to his rescue, translating whenever he required it.

My father had required him to speak English at the dinner table. He’d known that Bryce needed to learn. But Maman and I had been his port in the storm. We spoke French when my father was out of the house, and we helped him adjust to life in a new city.