I have a thousand. I ask the one that matters most. “Is the baby okay?” The word still feels new in my mouth—massive and fragile.
Her smile is small and real. “Right now? Yes.”
Right now. The two words that keep saving me.
When she steps out, the room regains its edges. Riley’s eyes find mine and hold. There’s gratitude in them and fear and the kind of strength I’ve tried to borrow since the first time she told me to sit the hell down and ice my wrist like I wasn’t special.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and hear the old habit in it—the one where I apologize for storms I didn’t cause because I sailed into them like I could outrun weather. I correct. “I’m not sorry we fought for us. I’m sorry I didn’t build quieter lanes sooner.”
“Hey,” she says, thumb brushing the heel of my hand. “We’re here. That counts.”
It counts. It also asks for something from me I’ve never been any good at in public: surrender.
I inhale, slow, until the top of my lungs stops burning. “I’m going to say this once like a vow and then a thousand more times like I mean it,” I tell her, voice rough but sure. “I will never choose the game over you again. Not the cameras, not the contract, not the myth of being a guy who can carry everythingand still call it love. If the choice is ever real, I sit. I stay. I go where you go.”
Riley’s eyes shine, not with panic this time but with something that looks like landing. She squeezes my hand hard enough to hurt, and it does, and the hurt feels like truth. “Okay,” she whispers, the word strong. “Okay.”
The monitor keeps its patient beat. The bag of saline ticks down a millimeter. Outside the curtain, the ER murmurs on, but the square of light we’re in feels stubbornly, miraculously ours.
Time stretches to the hiss of saline and the pale scroll of numbers. I measure it by the way Riley’s hand stops trying to be a fist and remembers how to be a palm.
Dr. Hassan returns with a tablet tucked to her chest and the kind of smile that only shows up when a night is going to end better than it started. She checks the monitor one more time, brows relaxed. “Good,” she says, and the word is a soft landing. “No patterning. Tightening is easing. I’m comfortable sending you home after this bag and a bathroom victory lap.”
Riley’s laugh is small and relieved. Mine is a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
Dr. Hassan taps the tablet. “You’ll go home with written instructions—hydration targets, when to call, what to ignore. And I want you both to build margins into your week. Fewer bright lights. More boring TV. Your body just wrote you a memo.” She glances between us. “You read it.”
“We’ll read it out loud to each other,” I say. It’s only half a joke.
She nods, satisfied. “One more thing.” The tone shifts fromtonighttothe road aheadwithout losing warmth. “It’s time to start thinking about birth.” She says it like an invitation instead of a cliff. “Not a full plan—those change—but preferences. Support person—” her eyes flick to our hands like she’s taking attendance, “—pain management, pediatrician short list, classesif you want them, a tour so this place feels less like a spaceship at three a.m.”
The wordbirthlands in my chest like a dropped puck that suddenly belongs to me. Not a story, not a press conference, not a someday I can skate past. A date we don’t know yet that’s walking toward us anyway.
Riley swallows, then nods, brave in the way that doesn’t perform. “Okay,” she says. “We can do that.”
“Good,” Dr. Hassan repeats, writing something final that sounds like permission. “We’ll follow up in the clinic. Tonight you go home, you rest, you let other people worry about the internet.” She squeezes Riley’s shoulder again, gives me a look that saysyou too, and slips away, footsteps soft against the tile.
The room exhales with her. The bag empties to its last clear inch; the monitor’s ocean softens to a lazy tide. Riley turns her head on the pillow until she can see me without effort. “Birth,” she says, testing the syllable like it might crack.
“Birth,” I echo, and the echo changes the shape of the air. I picture the rink after a win—the way sound goes high and then drops out and you can hear your own skates. I picture a small person with a ridiculous grip around my finger. I picture walls that don’t need soundproofing because the only noise that matters is ours.
My laugh comes out ragged around the edges. Relief, fear, awe—three forwards on one chaotic shift. “It’s not someday,” I say, and my voice isn’t TV-ready; it’s human. “It’s soon.”
Riley threads our fingers, squeeze steady enough to hurt in the good way. “Soon,” she agrees, eyes wet and clear.
Outside the curtain, a monitor alarms and then quiets, footsteps pass, a coffee machine groans awake like the night is surrendering to morning. In here, the saline line goes slack, and a nurse whose name I didn’t catch says, bright with routine, “Let’s get you unhooked.”
I stand, legs unsteady for the first time all season, and the word keeps ringing between my ribs like a bell I’m not going to un-hear.
Soon.
Weeks stretch and fold like film through a projector—checkups, kicks, names that change with the weather. The city moves from rain to snow to melt again, and every season leaves its fingerprint on the glass.
Dr. Hassan keeps her promise ofconservative and careful.We learn what boring feels like, and we learn to love it. By the time spring leans toward summer,soonturns intoany-day-now,and the word stops sounding like fear. It sounds like arrival.
Chapter 31
Miracle on Ice
