Chapter 5 The Weight of Fake

MIA

The word fake followed me home that night and sat on my chest like something with weight.

I lay on my back in the dark with my clothes still on and the ceiling above me doing nothing useful and my brain running the dinner in loops, the press conference table, Caleb's hand on my knee, the way he had said she makes me want to be better like he had rehearsed it and also like he meant it, which was the specific combination that made it dangerous. I had been prepared for the performance. I had not been prepared for the possibility that something underneath the performance was real.

The clock on my phone said two fourteen in the morning.

Next door Mom was breathing. I counted without deciding to. One. Two. Three. Steady. Still there. I had been counting her breaths through the wall every night since the diagnosis and I could not stop even on the nights when I told myself to stop because stopping felt like tempting something, like the counting was the thing keeping the rhythm going and if I stopped paying attention the rhythm might stop too.

I knew that was not how it worked.

I counted anyway.

My phone buzzed.

Chloe: You almost smiled when he put his hand on your back.

Mia: I was performing.

Chloe: Sure you were.

Mia: Go to sleep.

Chloe: The way he looked at you though. That was not a performance.

I put the phone face down on the mattress and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw static. Chloe did not understand. Her mother was healthy. Her brother's hockey gear had not been held together by duct tape and the specific prayer of a sixteen year old girl who had learned to do equipment repairs from a YouTube video at midnight. She got to find this romantic. She got to sit on the outside of it and decide it was a love story.

From the outside it probably looked like one.

From the inside it was a contract. Twelve pages. Digital signature. Thirty thousand dollars in exchange for six months of showing up and not flinching and pretending that Caleb Kessler was something other than the boy who had laughed at me freshman year in front of everyone and forgotten my name for three months the year after.

I sat up and opened the contract on my phone.

Page eight had a clause I had not read carefully enough the first time. Both parties agree to maintain the appearance of a genuine romantic relationship at all family events as required by the Client. I read it twice. Family events. I had agreed to family events without fully understanding what that meant and now I was going to have to stand in the Kessler house and convince a man who ran a corporation that his son had genuinely fallen for the team manager from the east side whose mother was sick and whose apartment had peeling paint.

The refrigerator in the kitchen hummed.

Somewhere outside a car alarm went off twice and gave up.

I put the phone down and lay back and thought about the specific moment at the press conference when the reporter had asked about the fight allegations and Caleb had turned and looked at me before he answered and his eyes had been cold and calculating in the front and something else entirely underneath and he had said she makes me want to be better, not for the cameras, for me, and the cameras had flashed and I had kept my smile exactly where I put it and my heart had done something I had not authorized.

That was the problem.

My heart had started doing things without authorization and I needed it to stop.

I fell asleep at three and dreamed about nothing I could remember.

Morning came with a text.

Caleb: Press conference at two. Wear something that doesn't make you look like you're going to a funeral.

I stared at the screen.

Mia: This is how I always dress.

Caleb: Exactly.

I put the phone down and looked at the jersey hanging on the back of my door. Number seventeen. Wolves colors. It had started to smell like me now instead of him, which felt like a small and stupid victory but I took it anyway because I was operating on very little sleep and small stupid victories were what I had.

Mom was already at work.

I left her a note on the kitchen table the way I had been leaving notes since I was fourteen and she had started the overnight shifts. Gone to school. Love you. Three words that fit on a sticky note and meant everything I did not have time to say properly.

Caleb was already outside when I came down.

He was leaning against the hood of his truck with his arms crossed and a coffee cup in each hand and his hair still slightly damp from the shower and he looked less like a hockey star and more like a person, which was the specific thing about him I was finding hardest to manage, the moments when the version I had decided he was did not match the version that was actually standing in front of me.

You are early, I said.

You are late, he said.

I am right on time.

He smirked and held out the coffee. I took it. Warm. Sweet. Exactly how I liked it. I had not told him that.

Lucky guess, he said, and got in the truck before I could ask how.

The press conference went the way press conferences went. Derek pacing. Cameras. The specific performance of a couple that had been together long enough to be comfortable and not so long that the comfort looked staged. Caleb's hand found my knee under the table the moment we sat down and I did not flinch because I had trained myself not to flinch.

Then the reporter asked about the fight.

Then Caleb said the thing about wanting to be better.

Then we were in the hallway afterward and I was telling him that was not in the contract and he was saying maybe you are and I was saying don't and he was saying don't what and I was saying don't say things that make this harder to walk away from.

He had told me about the dinner then. Friday night. His father's house.

No, I had said.

It is not a request, he had said.

I had hated that he was right.

Fine, I had said. One dinner.

He had walked away and I had stood in the hallway with cold coffee in my hand and the specific realization arriving quietly that I had stopped hating him somewhere between the press conference and this hallway and I did not know exactly when and that was its own kind of problem.

Then my phone rang.

Unknown number. Local area code.

I picked up.

Is this Mia Lin, the woman said. Dr. Patel's office at Hamilton General. We need you to come in tomorrow morning. It is regarding your mother's latest scan results.

The hallway tilted.

Her next scan is not until, I started.

We moved it up, the woman said. Ms. Lin, the doctor wants to speak with you directly. Please come in at nine.

The line went quiet.

I stood in the arena hallway with the noise of the building around me and the cold coffee in my hand and the contract on my phone and Caleb somewhere behind me and the world moving like nothing had shifted.

Everything had shifted.