In her mind’s eye, she could see Dodge dressed in his jersey—number forty-four—intercepting a puck, or even a player, slamming into the boards, recovering, finding the puck, shooting it down to the other end of the ice.

Saving the day.

The hero he was.

Yeah, ghosts.

But what if it had been Dodge in the street? Her breath caught, snagged on the old shards of her broken heart. After ten years, surely he would have forgiven her.

They’d been children, really. Okay, old enough to know better.

Oh, she’d been such a fool.

Sometimes she could still see his face, bloodied, some tears, maybe, in his fury.

So shattered.

Maybe forgiveness was out of reach. And really, maybe it didn’t matter. They’d both moved on.

Okay, one of them had moved on. She’d just dug into a life that made her feel safe.

She shook the most brutal memories away, leaving only the image of Dodge skating to the edge of the rink, grabbing a drink, then searching for her in the stands, those deep blue eyes like the sky before a storm.

Her headlights carved out the night as she headed toward the Copper Mountain Bridge, back to their homestead tucked away in the woods.

Thankfully, the ghost would be gone by morning.

three

All Dodge had to do was make it back home in one piece.

So far, so good. First of all, he’d made it into the air. And once there, as usual, the scenery and finding his own piece of the sky sucked the fear clean out of him.

He may have panicked for nothing. Maybe his bad luck was in the rearview mirror.

To the north, out his starboard window, the ragged Alaskan range jutted skyward, heavily blanketed with a layer of snow and ice, its granite peaks fierce and lethal. A pale blue sky hinted at the severe chill that had descended upon the Denali valley, sweeping southward into the town of Copper Mountain and the surrounding areas. He could practically write his thoughts in the air gathered with his breath this morning when he’d gone out for his preflight check.

Thoughts that had been on last night’s face-off with his father.

He should have known that the détente wouldn’t hold.

“What are you doing up?” Dodge had asked last night when he got home with the pain meds.

Yep, just like Mal said, Dodge had found the old man in the kitchen, scrambling eggs. Totally ignoring doctor’s orders, like it might be ten years ago, when Dodge came home from hockey practice famished.

Like the past decade had been an illusion.

Dodge didn’t mention it to Larke, but it also bothered him that his father hadn’t changed Dodge’s room even an iota in ten years. His hockey posters of Jace Jacobsen with the Blue Ox were still up, his trophies gathering dust on his dresser.