If Only You (Bergman Brothers, #6)(7)

If I don’t put on a good show of having cleaned up my act, I might really lose the only things that matter to me. Hockey. The rare friendship that’s burrowed its way into my existence. The lifestyle that brings me the indulgent pleasures I so thoroughly enjoy.

Stretched out on Ren’s sofa, I rack my brain, wondering for the first time in my adult life how I could possibly pull off the ruse of being a decent human being.

I don’t have the first idea where to begin.





3





ZIGGY





Playlist: “Body of Mine,” Liz Brasher





Sunday family dinner used to be my favorite part of the week. All the local Bergmans, and when they’re visiting, the Washington State siblings with their partners, seated around the long, worn wood table at my parents’ place. Laughter and conversation over a spread of my Swedish mother’s family recipes and flickering candlelight.

But now Sunday family dinner is just another place where I feel trapped in a role that fits like old clothes after a growth spurt—too small, aggravatingly tight. And I don’t know exactly how to change that. I know I’ve outgrown the labels I used to wear, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what I want to put on now, what will feel right.

I guess I wish that my family of all people could make a little space for me, act even just a little open to the possibility of my growth and change, while I figured that out.

I’m sitting with my niece at the kids’ end of the table, surrounded by coloring books and tiny squishmallows, to give you a sense of how far that wish is from coming true.

Don’t get me wrong, my niece, Linnea—Linnie, as we call her—is adorable. Three and a half, highly verbal, she’s so precocious, she has me worried she’s going to give my mischievous brothers, Viggo and Oliver, a run for their money.

However, while we eat a delicious meal, candles down at the other end of the table so they’re out of her reach, I’m keenly aware that I’ve been listening to her poop and fart jokes—albeit very clever poop and fart jokes—for the past twenty minutes, while my parents sit at the other end of the table, deep in conversation with the rest of my local siblings and their partners. Linnie’s parents, my sister, Freya, and her husband, Aiden, who burps their infant son, Theo, on his shoulder, sit across from my brothers Viggo and Oliver, and Ollie’s partner, Gavin. Beside them are my sister-in-law, Frankie, and my brother Ren. They all lean in, elbows on the table, heads close, glasses of wine and beer in hand as dancing candlelight illuminates their faces.

While I sit down here, with a cup bearing a lid and a straw because apparently Mom still thinks I’m nine and prone to spill. Sighing, I move a tiny squishmallow off my niece’s Pokémon coloring book and start to shade Pikachu’s big pointy ear.

Linnie leans in, those ice-blue Bergman eyes locked on me. Her dark wavy hair, like Aiden’s, is half out of its bun, which bounces as she wiggles her eyebrows. “I got another joke, Aunt Ziggy.”

I force a smile and wipe a streak of sauce off her cheek. “I’m all ears.”

“What are a clown’s farts like?”

A sigh leaves me. “I don’t know. What are they like?”

She wiggles her eyebrows again and says, “They smell funny.”

I wrinkle my nose dramatically, knowing it will please this kid who loves to gross people out. “Ewww.”

She lets out a goofy chuckle and stabs a bite of cut-up meatball. “That’s my new favorite.”

As Linnie shoves the meatball in her mouth, I catch the tail end of Ren’s sentence: “Thankfully he only bruised his foot, but he’s still out for at least another two weeks.”

“The one he broke this summer?” Freya, who’s a physical therapist and familiar with injuries like his, the work of their recovery, grimaces at Ren’s nod. She takes a fussing Theo from Aiden, and lifts some secret flap in her shirt, then cuddles him into her arm to nurse again. “That’s rough.”

“A banged-up foot is the least of his problems,” Frankie mutters. “His public image is in much worse shape. He crashed his damn—sorry, darn,” she amends for Linnie’s benefit, “car right into an after-school outreach program facility. While recklessly driving with a broken foot. The optics are terrible.”

Gavin frowns thoughtfully. Like Ollie, he’s a professional soccer player, though he’s now retired. “His sponsors dropped him?”

“Like a hot potato.” Frankie takes a deep drink of her wine. “And he’s—sorry for the pun—on incredibly thin ice with the Kings’ management.”

“I’m worried about him,” Ren admits. “Seb’s always had a reckless streak, but this latest slipup seems more serious than before.”

“It is more serious than a slipup,” Frankie says. “It’s rock bottom.”

My stomach knots. I shouldn’t care two figs about Sebastian Gauthier. But hearing that he drove his car into a building and hurt himself even more, knowing he’s fallen out of his sponsors’ good graces and is in huge trouble with the team, makes me inexplicably sad.

I’ve seen Sebastian when I’ve been to Ren’s games, flying across the ice. The man comes alive when he plays. If he feels for hockey even close to what I feel for soccer, he has to be miserable with himself right now for jeopardizing his career.