Chapter 93 Luke

Chapter 93 Luke
Luke

⛸️

The ice feels different now.

Not the texture—that hasn't changed. Same frozen surface, same bite of cold when I step onto the rink, same scrape of blades cutting through practice drills. But something in the way I carry myself on it has shifted, like my center of gravity moved an inch to the left and I haven't figured out how to compensate yet.

Three months since the arrest. Two since the story broke. One since I started being able to sleep through the night without waking up gasping, checking my ribs for a wound that healed into a scar I mostly don't look at.

Mostly.

Coach blows the whistle and I pivot, skating backward to join the line for drills. The locker room was quiet when I suited up this morning. It always is now—not the comfortable quiet of guys mentally preparing for practice, but the careful quiet of people walking on ice that's too thin.

Everyone knows.

Nobody says it.

I catch Mitch looking at me from the goal crease, his mask pushed up onto his helmet. He holds my gaze for half a second longer than normal, then looks away. That’s been the pattern. Longer looks, then avoidance. Questions they’re too polite—or too uncomfortable—to ask.

Was it you?

Did she touch you?

How could you not know?

The drills start. Crossovers. Stops and starts. The physical burn is familiar, welcome. When my lungs are screaming and my legs are heavy, I don't have room to think about interrogation rooms or the way Detective Chen would watch me when I struggled to explain why I kept going back to her house, why I hid my phone from Mercedes, why I thought—really thought—that what Beverly and I had was something special.

"Pick it up, Luke!" Coach yells.

I push harder, edges digging into the ice. The cold air stings my lungs. This is the only place I feel like myself anymore—mid-stride, moving fast enough that the past can't catch up.

After practice, I'm sitting on the bench untying my skates when the locker room empties out faster than usual. Guys grab their bags, mumble goodbyes, scatter like someone dropped a grenade in the center of the room. I don't look up until I hear Coach clear his throat.

He's standing by the whiteboard, arms crossed, looking at me with an expression I can't read. We've barely spoken since it happened. He gave a statement to the press about "supporting all our athletes" and made the team attend a mandatory seminar on appropriate boundaries with staff. That was it.

"You got a minute, Luke?"

My hands still on my laces. "Yeah."

He waits until the last guy files out—the door swinging shut with a metallic click that echoes too loud—then sits on the bench across from me. He’s still in his coaching jacket, the team logo embroidered over his heart. I stare at it instead of his face.

"I wanted to check in," he says. "See how you're doing."

The question feels enormous, too heavy for the space between us.

"I'm fine," I say. Automatic. The same lie I tell my mom when she asks if I'm sleeping, the same lie I tell my therapist when she asks if I'm processing, the same lie I tell Mercedes when she wakes up at 3 AM to find me staring at the ceiling.

Coach Morrison nods like he expected this. "The team... they're handling things okay. No issues there. But I wanted you to know—" He pauses, choosing words like he's picking through broken glass. "What happened wasn't your fault. You understand that, right?"

My jaw tightens. Not my fault. I've heard this from Officer Bailey, from the victim's advocate, from the pamphlets they gave me about trauma and grooming and the psychology of manipulation. Intellectually, I get it. Beverly was the adult. Beverly was the authority figure. Beverly crossed lines she was trained not to cross, used techniques I couldn't recognize because I was seventeen when it started and lonely and desperate for someone to see me as more than just potential.

But the other part of me—the part that wakes up sweating, remembering how I leaned into her touch, how I sought her out after bad games, how I told her things I never told Mercedes—that part isn't so sure.

"She killed them," I say quietly. The words taste metallic. "The other boys. She killed them when they tried to leave."

Coach's face goes pale. He knows. Everyone knows now. The investigation pulled up bodies in six different states—hockey players, all of them. Runaways, they'd been classified. Troubled kids who fell through cracks. Until Beverly's hard drive and storage boxes revealed the photographs, the journals, the detailed records of their "relationships" and the precise dates they stopped being useful to her.

"I know," Coach says, his voice rough. "Luke, I can't imagine—"

"You don't have to imagine," I say, sharper than I mean to. "I'm still here. I'm the one who didn't end up in a shallow grave behind some abandoned house."

The silence stretches. I go back to untaping my skates, fingers rough with the motion, tearing the white cloth more than peeling it.

"I'm sorry," Coach says finally. "I should have seen something. I hired her. I vetted her. I—"

"You couldn't have known," I say. It sounds like I'm comforting him, which is wrong, but I don't know how to stop. "She was good at it. She was really good at being exactly what everyone needed her to be."

I stand up, bag in hand, and for the first time I look him in the eye. He looks older than he did four months ago. We all do.

"I'll be at practice tomorrow," I say. "I'm not quitting."

He opens his mouth like he wants to say something else—maybe that I should take more time, maybe that he's proud of me, maybe that he's sorry—but I don't wait to hear it. I push through the door into the empty hallway, my skates dangling from my bag, the weight of everyone's eyes following me even when no one's there.

⛸️

Mercedes is waiting in the parking lot, leaning against her car, phone in hand. She looks up when she sees me, and her face does that thing it always does now—relief first, then caution, then the careful smile she’s been practicing.

"How was practice?" she asks as I slide into the passenger seat.

"Fine," I say. "Coach wanted to talk."

Her hands tighten on the steering wheel. She doesn't ask what about. She knows the script by now—the check-ins, the wellness conversations, the careful monitoring of my mental state like I'm a bomb that might go off.

"Therapy today," she reminds me gently, pulling out of the lot. "Five o'clock. We have time to grab food if you want."

Therapy. Dr. Okonkwo's office with the soft lighting and the box of tissues on the side table and the questions that dig under my skin like splinters I can't remove.

"Yeah," I say. "Okay."

We drive in silence that's become comfortable over the past few months. Mercedes has been—there's no other word for it—extraordinary. She hasn't pushed me to talk about it when I don't want to. She hasn't treated me like I'm broken, even when I feel like I am. She just shows up. Every day. Every practice. Every nightmare.

She reaches over and takes my hand at a red light. Her thumb traces over my knuckles, gentle, grounding.

"I love you," she says. It's not the first time she's said it since everything happened, but it still makes my chest tighten.

Beverly said she loved me too.

But when Mercedes says it, she doesn't follow it with a demand. She doesn't use it like a leash or a reward or a weapon. She just says it, lets it hang in the air between us, and keeps driving.

"I know," I say. It's not "I love you too," but it's close. It's what I have right now.

She smiles like it's enough.

⛸️

Dr. Okonkwo's office smells like lavender and old books. I sit in the armchair I always choose, the one that faces away from the window, and stare at the degrees on her wall while she waits for me to speak.

"How are the nightmares?" she asks.

"Better," I say. "Only had one this week."

"Tell me about it."

I don't want to, but I do. It's part of the deal—show up, talk, try to make sense of the tangled mess Beverly left inside my head. I describe the dream: the knife, the stairs, the feeling of falling. But in the dream, Mercedes never comes. The police never arrive. I just fall and fall and Beverly stands over me with that same soft smile, saying I love you while I bleed out.

Dr. Okonkwo nods, taking notes. "And when you're awake? Do you still find yourself defending her?"

The question is sharp, precise. She's asked it before in different ways.

"Sometimes," I admit. "Not like I think she was right. Just... I think about the good moments. The way she made me feel seen. And then I have to remind myself that it was calculated. That she was studying me to figure out how to hook me."

"That must be difficult," she says. "To grieve the connection while learning it was manufactured."

I lean forward, elbows on my knees, head in my hands. "She killed people," I say, my voice muffled. "I have to keep reminding myself of that. When I start missing her, or wondering if it was really that bad, I make myself look at the case files. The boys she buried. Tyler, Marcus, James. They were my age. They thought they were in love too. And when they realized they weren't, when they tried to get away, she—"

My throat closes. I can't say it.

"Survivor's guilt," Dr. Okonkwo says softly. "It's common in situations like this. You wonder why you lived when others didn't."

"I know why I lived," I say, looking up. "Mercedes. She trusted her gut. She saw what I couldn't. If she hadn't called the police when she did..." I touch my side, where the scar is hidden under my shirt. "I'd be another runaway statistic. Another troubled hockey player who disappeared."

"Mercedes cares about you deeply," Dr. Okonkwo says. "But it's important that you recognize—you survived because of your own actions too. You fought back. You tried to escape. You did what you needed to do to stay alive."

I want to believe her. Some days I do. Other days I feel like a fraud—someone who stumbled out of a burning building while carrying a match, wondering if I started the fire without knowing it.

"She's pleading not guilty," I say, changing the subject. "Did you see the news?"

"I did."

"Insanity defense. She says she loved us. That she was protecting us from ourselves. From leaving her." I laugh, but it comes out broken. "Can you believe that? She thinks she was saving us by killing us."

"Manipulation often becomes reality to the manipulator," Dr. Okonkwo says. "But that doesn't make it true. And it doesn't make what happened to you any less real, or any less wrong."

I stare at my hands. They're shaking slightly, the way they do when I haven't eaten or when I haven't slept or when I think too hard about the way Beverly's hand felt on my face, guiding me, claiming me.

"I think I'm angry," I say quietly. "Finally."

"Tell me about that."

"I'm angry at her. For choosing me. For making me feel special when I was just... convenient. For the lies. For the knife. For making me doubt my own mind so badly that I still sometimes wake up and think, maybe she really did love me."

The words spill out, hot and jagged.

"I'm angry at Coach for hiring her. I'm angry at my mom for not noticing I was pulling away. I'm angry at myself for being so fucking desperate for approval that I walked right into a trap any adult should have seen."

"Anger is appropriate," Dr. Okonkwo says. "Anger is part of healing."

"But mostly," I continue, my voice dropping, "I'm angry that she took something from me I can't get back. She took... everything. And she made me think I was giving it. She made me think I was choosing. And now when Mercedes touches me, sometimes I flinch because my body doesn't know the difference between real love and the weaponized kind."

Mercedes and I haven't slept together since before it happened. We haven't talked about why. She hasn't pushed. But I see the question in her eyes sometimes, the worry that I've been ruined, that Beverly broke something in me that can't be fixed.

"You will," Dr. Okonkwo says. "In time. Your body is learning to feel safe again. That takes time."

I nod, wiping my face with my sleeve. I'm crying and I didn't realize it started.

"I want to be normal," I say. "I want to go to practice and worry about my stats and fight with Mercedes about stupid shit and graduate and go to college and forget any of this ever happened."

"You won't forget," she says gently. "But it will become part of your history rather than your present. And Luke—" She waits until I look at her. "What you're describing is normal. This is what healing looks like. Messy. Slow. Nonlinear. But real."

I think about the ice earlier. How it felt wrong but also right. How I'm learning to skate with a new center of gravity.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay?"

"Okay. I'll keep showing up."

She smiles, warm and genuine. "That's all any of us can do."

⛸️

Mercedes is in the waiting room, reading a magazine she doesn't care about. She looks up when I come out, searching my face for clues about how the session went.

"Good?" she asks.

"Productive," I say. "I'm hungry."

She grins—the first real grin I've seen in days, the one that crinkles her eyes and makes her look like the girl I fell for before everything got complicated.

"I know a place," she says, standing up and taking my hand.

We walk out into the afternoon light, and for the first time in months, I let myself believe that this—her hand in mine, the sun on my face, the future stretching out uncertain but possible—might be enough.

Might be real.

Might be mine.

Beverly took a lot from me. But she didn't take this. She didn't take the ability to recognize real love when it's standing right in front of me, patient and steady and waiting.

I squeeze Mercedes' hand, and she squeezes back.

And we keep walking.