‘How will you make sure I enter it?’ Her smile falters slightly, and when it returns, it’s forced, her eyebrows drawn upward. She looks tired. Resigned. ‘You won’t be here.’

She’s not wrong.

‘You’ll leave again.’

Yeah, I’m leaving again. I don’t know when I’ll be back. If I’ll be back. I’ve already overstayed my time off.

I scratch the back of my neck awkwardly. ‘Training camp starts—’

‘In two weeks. I know. We watch the MLL.’ Maybe it’s supposed to be teasing coming from May, but it comes out dejected. ‘If we win the quarter-finals, if we move on to the semis … you won’t be there.’

‘May—’

‘Colt. You won’t be there if somehow, some way, we win the damn thing.’ She uses her palms to wipe the last of the tears from her cheeks. Erasing the evidence. ‘And you won’t be there when I make the decision. So …’ She sniffs, pushing herself to her feet. ‘Maybe the way I left things earlier in the week was for the best. You know?’

‘May – no. There’s no way.’ My words come out running together, feverish and desperate. I take her hands in mine when I stand up with her. ‘Please, May. We can’t just be right person, wrong time for the rest of our lives, can we? How do we live with that?’

May pushes herself up to her tiptoes and presses a kiss to my cheek. ‘Still such different destinations,’ she whispers, her hair brushing my skin. ‘You’ll have to live with your destination. And I with mine.’

She picks up her stick from beside us. I watch her retreating as she heads back up to the house through the sliding patio door.

Chapter Forty

Painless Pain

May

Orchestrating the fine details of a fake breakup is much harder when it feels awfully real.

‘You ought to make sure you shed a few tears. Make sure that after the match, even if we lose—’

‘By God, that won’t happen,’ I cut into Jordan’s musing.

‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘Make sure that you do a dramatic little pull-him-into-the-tunnel with you for a very important conversation. And then after, sprinkle some tears. I guess. I’m not sure how movie stars do it. But seeing as you’re making the objectively wrong decision … it shouldn’t be hard.’

My best friend’s usually light voice has a new kind of bite to it. It’s that kind of upset someone gets when they spend hours giving you handcrafted advice, and then you go and flip them the bird by ignoring it.

‘Forget the guy.’ The corner of Jordan’s mouth twitches angrily. ‘I can’t believe that after all these years, you’re letting me declare for the draft alone.’

‘Jordan …’ I start softly, placing a hand on her arm, but she shrugs me away. She’s definitely pissed, not to mention very disappointed.