The Hockey Star's Forgotten Baby Mama novel · Chapter 19 of 32

Chapter 19: The Photo

I didn't realize I'd stopped breathing until Johnny's mother put her hand on my wrist.

"That's you," she said. "Isn't it."

"Yes."

"In the red."

"It was borrowed."

Johnny came down the stairs in his socks.

"She's out cold," he said. "She's still wearing the hat." Then he saw our faces. "What?"

His mother turned the print around for him.

He looked at it for a long time.

At himself, laughing with a towel around his neck.

At the girl by the fire escape doors, watching him like he was the only lit thing in the room.

"Dad took this," he said.

"Your father took everything," said his mother. "I have a whole envelope from that weekend. He made me get the roll developed after the funeral. I couldn't look at it."

"Can we?" I asked.

She went back to the closet.

We didn't look that night.

Johnny sat next to me on his mother's couch with his arm around me, and his mother pretended not to see.

We watched the late highlights with the sound off until I fell asleep against him.

In the morning his mother made eggs in a black pan, the yolks runny and perfect, and slid the envelope across the table.

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