~~~~~ Emery’s Pov ~~~~~
Saturday started with a text that read
*wear something you’d actually wear, not something you think he wants to see*
And ended, twelve hours later, with me standing in a restaurant bathroom trying to remember how to breathe normally.
But that was later.
First, there was the game.
I’d been to exactly one hockey game in my life before that afternoon.
The goal attempt on the practice rink hardly counted and nothing about watching an actual game prepared me for how loud it was, how fast, how the whole arena seemed to hold its breath every time Calloway touched the puck.
I sat in the family section, which Calloway had arranged with an efficiency that suggested she’d done this kind of logistical maneuvering before, close enough to the glass that I could hear the impact every time someone got checked into the boards.
Her father sat two seats down.
I recognized him instantly, even before Calloway had pointed him out in a text the night before.
The same sharp jaw, the same careful, assessing eyes, dressed in a coat that probably cost more than my entire semester’s textbooks.
He didn’t look at me when I sat down.
He didn’t look at me for most of the first period, actually, his attention fixed entirely on the ice with an intensity that made the whole section feel colder somehow, like his focus itself was a kind of weather system.
It wasn’t until the second intermission that he finally turned, extending a hand with the same careful precision he seemed to bring to everything.
“You must be Emery,” he said.
Not a question.
“Richard Marchetti.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand, aware of exactly how much scrutiny was packed into the two seconds his grip lasted.
“Calloway mentioned you tutor her.
Chemistry, I believe.”
“That’s right.”
“And now you’re dating her as well.” He said it flatly, no accusation in his tone, which somehow made it worse than if there had been.
“Efficient.
Two birds at once.”
I felt my face go warm, unsure whether he meant it as an insult or an observation, and decided, on the spot, that with this particular man there probably wasn’t much difference between the two.
“I care about her,” I said, which was true in a way that felt dangerous to say out loud to her father, of all people, three weeks into a lie we’d built to survive exactly this conversation.
“The tutoring and the rest of it aren’t really related.”
“Everything’s related, Miss Hale.
That’s simply how the world works.” He turned back to the ice without further comment, and I spent the rest of the period with my heart pounding, replaying the exchange, trying to figure out if I had passed some invisible test or failed one I hadn’t even known was being administered.
Calloway scored twice that game.
Both times, I caught myself standing and cheering before I’d consciously decided to, and both times, when she skated past the glass afterward, her eyes found mine in the crowd before they found her father’s.
Asmall, private acknowledgment that felt more real than anything we had rehearsed.
Dinner was worse.
The restaurant was the kind of place where the menu didn’t list prices, where the waiter refilled water glasses before they were even close to empty, and where Richard Marchetti had clearly been coming for years, judging by the way the host greeted him by name and led us to a table tucked in a private corner, away from the rest of the dining room.
Calloway sat beside me instead of across, her knee pressed lightly against mine under the table.
The agreed-upon boundary, minimal but present, and I was grateful for the small, steady point of contact more than I wanted to admit.
“So,” Richard said, once the appetizers had arrived and been mostly ignored, “tell me about yourself, Emery.
Calloway’s been remarkably tight-lipped.”
“There’s not much to tell.
I’m pre-med, on a full academic scholarship.
I tutor on the side.”
“A scholarship student.” Something flickered behind his eyes, quick enough that I almost missed it.
“Admirable.
I respect that more than people expect me to.”
“Thank you.”
“Though I confess I’m curious how a scholarship student found the time to also become romantically involved with my daughter, given how demanding I understand her schedule to be.
And yours, presumably.”
The question landed exactly where I suspected he had intended it to.
A probe wrapped in politeness, testing the seams of the story Calloway and I had built.
I felt Calloway tense slightly beside me, and I reached for the water glass more to buy myself a second than because I actually wanted it.
“We met tutoring,” I said carefully.
“Twice a week became a habit.
The habit became something else.
It wasn’t really a decision so much as something that happened while we weren’t looking for it.”
It was, I realized as I said it, mostly true — true enough that it came out easily, without the careful construction the rest of our cover story required.
Richard studied me for a long moment, something calculating behind his expression that reminded me uncomfortably of Calloway in Coach Marsh’s office, that first day, sizing me up like an opponent across a faceoff circle.
“You’re better at this than I expected.”
“At what?”
“Handling me.” A thin, humorless smile.
“Most people either flatter or flee.
You’re doing neither.
It’s an interesting strategy.”
“It’s not a strategy.
It’s just the truth.”
“Everything’s a strategy, Miss Hale, whether you intend it that way or not.” He reached for his water glass, studying me over the rim of it in a way that made my chest tighten.
“Excuse me a moment,” I said, my voice coming out more breathless than I intended, and I slipped away from the table before either of them could respond.
I made it to the small, marble-tiled bathroom before the shaking in my hands became visible to anyone but me.
The room was empty.
Soft lighting glowing inside it, the kind designed to make everyone look expensive, a single attendant’s chair sitting unused in the corner.
I locked myself in the far stall anyway, because even an empty room felt too exposed for what I actually needed to do, which was stand very still and remember how lungs were supposed to work.
In.
Out.
In.
My reflection in the small mirror mounted inside the stall door looked like someone else entirely.
My hair still neat from the effort I had put into it that morning, and my dress still perfectly in place.
None of it matching the way my heart was slamming against my ribs like it was trying to escape the situation entirely.
*Handling me,* he had said, like I was a horse he was assessing for purchase.
*Most people either flatter or flee.*
I pressed my palms flat against the cool marble of the stall wall and made myself breathe through the four-count Priya had taught me sophomore year, back when midterms used to be the scariest thing in my life.
In for four.
Hold for four.
Out for four.
It wasn’t midterms anymore.
It was a man who could end Calloway’s housing with a phone call, sitting six feet away from me, testing every word out of my mouth for a crack he could use.
And it was Calloway.
Sitting close enough that her knee had been pressed against mine the entire dinner, steady and warm and entirely too significant for something we had agreed was minimal, not performative.
I gave myself thirty more seconds.
That was the deal I made with the version of myself that wanted to sit down on the floor of this very expensive bathroom and not move for the rest of the night.
Thirty seconds, and then I would walk back out there and finish what I had started, because that was what I agreed on.
I splashed cold water on my wrists, an old trick my mother swore by, and watched my pulse slow by fractions in the mirror.
*I care about her,*
I had told him, and it had come out true before I had even meant to let it.
That was the part actually terrifying me, more than the money or the stipend or the careful chess game Richard Marchetti seemed to be playing with his own daughter’s life.
Not the lie.
The truth, slipping out sideways, uninvited, in front of exactly the wrong audience.
I dried my hands, smoothed my dress, and unlocked the stall door.
By the time I slid back into my seat beside Calloway, her knee found mine again under the table without either of us mentioning it, and Richard turned his attention to Calloway, something in his posture shifting, subtly.
“Your grades.
I’ve seen the improvement.
I want to know it’s sustainable, and not simply a temporary effect of new motivation that will fade the moment the novelty does.”
“It’s sustainable,” Calloway said, her voice tighter than it had been all night.
“I’m doing the work, Dad.
Not her.
Me.”
“With her help.”
“With help I needed.
The way plenty of people need help with things they’re not naturally good at.” Something sharp entered her voice, the same edge I’d heard in the rink days ago.
“You’ve never once asked how the tutoring’s actually going.
You saw a photo and decided the story before you bothered to check the facts.”
The table went quiet.
I felt the tension coil tight around us, aware suddenly of exactly how much was riding on the next few seconds, on whether this dinner ended in reconciliation or disaster, on whether the plan Calloway and I had built over a legal pad and a list of rules was about to survive contact with the actual man it had been designed for.
Richard set down his fork deliberately.
“You’re right,” he said finally, surprising both of us.
“I didn’t ask.
I should have.”
It wasn’t warmth, exactly.
Nothing about him seemed built for warmth.
But it was something, a small crack in the careful control he had maintained since the moment I had shaken his hand, and Calloway’s shoulders eased fractionally beside me, like she had been bracing for a blow that hadn’t landed the way she expected.
“The stipend stays,” Richard said, addressing this to his water glass more than to either of us.
“For now.
I’ll want to see the next set of grades before I fully reconsider my position.”
“That’s fair,” Calloway said quietly.
“It’s not about fair.
It’s about results.” But something in his tone had softened, almost imperceptibly, and for the rest of the dinner the conversation drifted into safer territory.
About his work, Calloway’s season, a question about my major that felt, for the first time all night, like genuine curiosity instead of assessment.
By the time we left the restaurant, cold air hitting my face like a relief after hours of careful performance, I felt hollowed out in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.
“You did that,” Calloway said, once we were alone on the sidewalk, her father’s car pulling away toward the airport behind us.
“Whatever just happened in there — that was you.”
“I didn’t do anything.
I just told him the truth, mostly.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” She looked at me for a long moment, something unguarded in her expression that she usually kept locked down tight.
“Nobody tells him the truth.
Everyone just tells him what he wants to hear.”
I didn’t have a response for that, standing there in the cold with the ghost of Richard Marchetti’s scrutiny still sitting heavy in my chest, and something in the way she was looking at me suggested the night hadn’t just been about surviving her father after all.
“Looks like I won’t survive this at all,” I whispered quietly to myself.