Adrian:Sounds like someone showed him the path.
Pickle:maybe. or maybe he was always going to find it. I just happened to be there.
Adrian:That’s a big thing.
Indy was our last game on the trip.
The funny thing about finding your rhythm is you stop noticing when you’re in it. No drama there. No highlight-reel moments. Only sixty minutes of hockey that felt exactly how hockey was supposed to feel.
I scored one and assisted on two more—one to Jake, one to Heath, who buried his second goal of the trip with a wrist shot that surprised everyone, including himself.
4-1, Storm. Final. Seven points in four games for me. Plus-eight. Zero penalties. Best road trip of my career.
Alignment.
I’d spent more than two years forcing a key into a lock, and someone had gently rotated my wrist two degrees. That made everything click. The key had always fit. I’d just been holding it wrong.
Chapter twelve
Adrian
The carpet had a pattern. I'd walked it enough times to know.
Beige diamonds inside gray squares, repeating in a grid that someone in a corporate office had selected from a trove of forgettable options. Practical. Stain-resistant. The kind of flooring designed to witness a thousand small crises without lingering evidence.
I'd been pacing for thirty-five minutes.
I was counting because it was what I did when the alternative was thinking. Thought would lead to the email sitting in my sent folder like an unexploded grenade.
We need to talk about the edit. I have concerns about the direction.
Concerns. What a coward's word. It was the language of someone who still thought he could thread the needle between conscience and career.
Three hours until the ETA for Pickle's bus.
The mini-fridge hummed at its irritating frequency. The bed was unmade, sheets twisted. I walked past it and kept walking.
The problem with irreversible decisions was that the moment of making them felt nothing like the hours that followed. Sending the footage of Pickle had been easy.Here's what you asked for. Standard procedure.I'd told myself I was being strategic. Building goodwill. Buying time to fight for the edit that mattered.
Now I stood in my hotel room in Thunder Bay, waiting for a bus that would bring back someone I'd already failed to protect.
Two hours and forty-eight minutes.
I opened the laptop.
My folder structure was meticulous—dated subfolders, descriptive file names. A map of my time observing the Storm, laid out in gigabytes and timestamps. I scrolled past the files I needed and stopped on the ones I wanted.
Pickle. Always Pickle.
The first clip was practice footage from four days ago. Pickle and Heath near the far blue line. Heath's posture was wrong—shoulders hunched, weight too far back, anticipating failure.
I watched Pickle lean closer. His hand hovered near Heath's shoulder blade, not touching. Ready to steady if needed. Heath tried the drill. Failed. His stick slammed the ice.
Pickle didn't flinch.
He said something. Heath's death-grip loosened by degrees. This time, Heath's feet found the pattern—not perfect, but better.
Pickle's celebration was immediate and enormous, a full-body explosion of joy that he caught mid-gesture and dialed back.
