The Husband Hour(48)

“Yes. In high school, he was always reading astronomy books. And he was really gifted in math, so he knew astronomy was something he could get into someday.”

When she’d met him, he had a Rottweiler named Polaris. The North Star, he’d explained to her. The brightest star in the constellation Ursa Minor.

Matt nodded, consulting his laptop. “Were you at the game the night the puck hit him in the jaw?”

“Yes. I didn’t see it happen because I was…talking to someone. But I went to the hospital immediately after.”

“Was there any talk at that time that he might have sustained a concussion in addition to injuring his jaw?”

“No. Not that I know of.”

Matt asked more about how Rory had homed in on a hockey career, and she told him about the agents showing up at Harvard by his junior year.

“They threw around such crazy numbers in terms of money,” she said. “Rory’s mom was a widow, and he worried about taking care of her. Once the money became a reality, there was no question he would go into the NHL.”

“And yet he opted to play for only two seasons,” Matt said.

Lauren swallowed hard. “That’s right.”

Matt asked about Rory’s injury in December of 2009, and she repeated what she’d told him off camera: Dean Wade was wrong. Rory hadn’t gotten a concussion. “He was back on the ice the next game.”

“But a few months later—the fight with the Flyers’ Chris Pronger. That was unquestionably a concussion,” he said.

“Yes,” she conceded. “It was. And a fight with the team we’d grown up watching. Talk about insult to injury.”

Rory would be out of play for a few weeks at least. The timing couldn’t have been worse: Rory had been scheduled to represent the United States in the Winter Olympics alongside an LA Kings teammate, goalie Jonathan Quick.

Lauren didn’t rush to buy a plane ticket after that injury, but then his mother called to say she was spending a week with Rory and maybe Lauren could find time to come the following week. With a lump of alarm in her throat, she’d said of course.

She had one day of overlap with Kay. Looking back on it, that was a mistake in planning. Rory’s mother busily cooked for him and fussed around the apartment, making Lauren feel extraneous. Kay talked endlessly about Emerson, who had just announced he was going back to West Point as an instructor.

“Your father would be so proud,” Kay said with a sniff over lasagna that night.

After dinner, Rory retreated to the bedroom. He watched CNN, as he apparently had been doing all day long for the past seven days. He was obsessed with the November shooting at Fort Hood.

“Try to get him out and about,” Kay said on her way to the airport in the morning. “I know you’re not much on cooking, so maybe a restaurant here or there will do him some good.”

Lauren convinced him to walk the few blocks to Hugo’s for dinner that night, but he was sullen and quiet. She’d been told that depression was a side effect of the concussion and tried to reassure herself—and him—that it was temporary.

“What am I doing with my life?” he said, slumped back in his seat at the restaurant, looking out at Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Come on, Rory. This is irrational. You’ll be back on the ice in a few weeks. This happens. It’s part of the deal when you play at this level—you know that.”

“What do you know about it?” he snapped.

“I’m just trying to help!”

“Well, don’t.”

She wanted to say fine, he could wallow in his self-pity by himself. She had exams to take. Instead, Lauren tried turning the conversation to more positive things, like their plans to spend July at the shore house. Her grandmother had died earlier in the year. She’d left the Green Gable to Beth, who told Lauren and Stephanie they could have the house for the summer—it was too soon for her to be there without her mother. A quick negotiation determined that Stephanie would have the house in June, Lauren would take it in July, and they’d split August depending on their schedules.

“It will be good to have some time for just the two of us,” Lauren told Rory. “In the place where it all started. Prom weekend, remember?”

He grumbled a response.

Later, when he was in the shower, she went outside and, standing among the exotic plants outside the apartment building, called Ashley Wade.

“Don’t take it personally,” Ashley said. “They all get nasty when they hit their heads. Trust me, in two months you’ll tell him, ‘You were a real jerk back then, you said such and such,’ and he’ll laugh and say he doesn’t remember.”

But she would remember. And for the first time in a very long time, her future with him seemed uncertain. He wasn’t the Rory she knew, and this made her nervous.

She called Emerson—a mistake.

“You can’t freak out over every little injury,” he said. “You’re dating a professional athlete.”

Lauren didn’t say any of this aloud to Matt.

And then Matt leaned slightly forward, not glancing at his computer but looking straight at her. He said, “His style of play changed after that. Everything changed after that, didn’t it?”

Lauren stared at him. She began to speak, then stopped. It would be a betrayal of Rory to reveal his weakness to the world; it was the last thing he would have wanted. “I don’t know what you mean by that.” Her hands fluttered to the mic clipped to her shirt. “Your hour is up.”