‘Nothing.’ May gestures to my stick with hers. ‘How’s it feel?’

‘Foreign,’ I say. That’s the best word for it. Ever since August, every stick, even my own, has felt like an unfamiliar face.

‘That’s because – may I?’

I nod. May puts her crosse down and adjusts my grip, her small hands over my bigger ones, and glances up at me with a reassuring smile. ‘How about now?’

Now, my eyes can’t move from her, and man, something absolutely unreal happens when she gives me that smile of hers. That warm fireplace, blanket in the cold, telling you everything is going to be alright, even when it feels like you have no way out. My hands are warm against the stick, and it moulds to my grip, the same way it has since I was a kid – the way it hasn’t felt since my injury.

‘Better,’ I manage to whisper, and she pats my hand.

‘Good. Let’s play.’

The ear-to-ear grin May sports as she shucks off her high heels and places the ball in the head of her stick, lined up at the face-off, is contagious. A warmth envelops my chest, and we meet in the middle with our crosses, on eye level.

‘Ready?’

‘As I’ll ever be.’

‘Go!’ She pushes her stick against mine with a giggle, and suddenly, I push right back. Instinct takes over, and I manoeuvre upwards, getting the ball to shoot up before landing in my net. From the midline, I run, and I swing my stick once I’m within scoring range, whipping the ball right into the goal. The whack of the net, the sweetest sound, echoes in the backyard, and for a moment, that’s all I can hear. It’s silent except for that sound. Triumph.

‘DAMN!’ whoops May, stick in the air. ‘You know what that was?’

She jogs up to me, grinning broadly, and she shakes me by the shoulders, cheeks pink with excitement, mascara-rimmed eyes wide, repeating, ‘You know what that was, Colt?’

‘Fuckin’ top ched.’ I laugh as she just shakes her head in disbelief.

‘A goal. Your goal.’

I’d still be concentrating on the goal if May weren’t here with me, but the light giddiness in her voice – decidedly not a part of the anger I’ve provoked in May for the past weeks – is all I can home in on. Her hair falls across her face in sheets of straightened dark brown so close to black that it reflects the light from the porch. She takes my face in her hands, locks her eyes with mine. ‘You are phenomenal.’

That’s all I want her to know. That she’s phenomenal. That every time our paths collide, she changes my life. That when I left, it tore a gash right through my heart, and that the gash is only healed again when I’m with her.