"Then I have nothing to worry about."
I believed him. "Stay. Don't leave while I'm asleep. The team's going to know soon anyway—they always know everything. I need you to still be here when I wake up."
"I promise. I swear on the haunted chair."
Sleep tugged at me. Adrian's body was warm against mine.
The chair creaked once more.
"She approves," I mumbled.
I didn't brace for impact or wait for the other shoe to drop. I'd chosen Adrian and fell asleep smiling.
Chapter twenty-six
Adrian
The Drop wasn't built for film screenings.
The projector—borrowed from the high school—sat on a stack of milk crates behind the bar, angled toward a pull-down screen that had seen better decades. Someone had duct-taped the bottom edge to keep it from curling. The sound system was the same one they used for karaoke nights, which meant the audio had a metallic edge that no amount of adjustment could fix.
It was perfect.
Three weeks had passed since the counter-documentary went live—quietly, announced by Juno's podcast and available online, with a brief introduction about consent and collaboration. No festival premiere. No press tour. A link that existed in the world, getting watched by people who cared.
The original network cut was gone. Buried under NDAs and strategic silence, the way inconvenient truths always disappeared. I'd stopped checking to see if anyone noticed. My pulse didn't spike anymore when I thought about it.
Tonight, Thunder Bay as a community got to see what we'd built instead.
I stood near the back wall, my shoulder pressed against aged wood paneling. Pickle was beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him. He'd changed after practice—jeans and a Storm hoodie, hair still damp, smelling like his cheap shampoo.
He reached out for my hand in the dark before the lights went down.
The crowd was bigger than I'd expected. Jake and Evan claimed the center table. Hog and Rhett sat in their usual corner booth. Biscuit curled into a ball at their feet. Coach Rusk stood against the opposite wall, arms crossed. Juno had set up near the front, blue hair catching the projector light.
There were others, too. Bar regulars. Faces from the grocery store, the arena, and from walking home through downtown on nights when the cold made us huddle close.
The town had shown up.
Juno dimmed the lights. The screen flickered to life.
My heart kicked against my ribs.
The opening shot was Thunder Bay from above—lake and sky, the Sleeping Giant, and the city tucked against the shore. Then the cut: inside the arena. Skate blades on ice and the hollow thunk of pucks against boards.
The camera found Pickle moving through a drill, stick handling with precision that contradicted everything the network cut had tried to sell. His edges were clean. His head was up. When he passed the puck, it landed exactly where it needed to.
No flash. Competence.
I watched the screen while keeping an eye on the audience. They'd put their phones away and focused on the screen.
The documentary showed Pickle at a youth clinic, crouched beside a kid in an oversized jersey. He spoke patiently and broke down the drill without condescension.
"Watch the defender's hips, not his stick. Hips don't lie."
The kid's face brightened. Tried it. Got it.
Cut to: the same kid—Dylan, in his Gretzky jersey—executing the move in a game. Pickle watched from the boards, grinning like he'd scored himself.
