I closed the laptop. Scripps. Miami. URI. Three application portals folding into the dark.
The phone stayed lit.
I picked it up. Scrolled to my agent's name.
"It's Kieran. I want to talk about the extension."
Chapter fifteen
Heath
Pratt looked at me through traffic.
Against Winnipeg, ninety seconds left in the period, Markel had sent our line out for a defensive-zone draw. Pratt settled into his crease and tapped both posts—a standard ritual. Then he looked up through the screen of bodies in front of him and found me. Brief. Direct. A single glance that saidI know where you are.
He'd never done that before. In October, he communicated with the defense. Forwards were something he adjusted to, tolerated, and worked around. He didn't look for us. He looked past us.
This was different. This was coordination. He trusted me to hold my position without collapsing into his sightline. Forwards who panic on defensive-zone draws drift low, clog the lane, and turn themselves into obstacles for their own goalie. Pratt had decided I wouldn't do that.
The faceoff went clean. I held my position. The period ended without incident.
None of it was dramatic. That was the point.
Things had been shifting for weeks, quietly, the way ice forms on a lake, not all at once but in layers, each one invisible until the surface held weight.
Against Nashville, I pulled a net-front assignment on a power play, second unit. I tipped Rook's wrister, tape to twine, no ricochet or comedy of angles. The goalie moved left because I'd positioned my body to suggest left, and I sent the puck right.
Varga, from the bench: "See, that's what I'm talking about. That's a proper goal. Architecturally sound. No thigh involvement. I'm going to stop calling them Donnelly Specials. This is a new era. This is Donnelly Intentionals."
"Please don't call them that either."
Rook had stopped verbally directing me in the defensive zone. Cross had started sending passes to coordinates I hadn't arrived at yet, releasing the puck without eye contact, trusting that I'd be there when it landed.
My goals weren't luck anymore. Luck was a puck deflecting off my thigh at an improbable angle. What was happening now resulted from standing in the same place, shift after shift, until I owned the space.
Markel's whiteboard didn't change. Day after day, my name sat on the left side of the first line. The dry-erase strokes had faded at the edges; nobody erasing and rewriting, just ink aging on the board.
At morning skate, I planted. Blade flat. Stick active. Rook's point shot came knee-high through traffic, and I tipped it without shifting my weight. The redirect caught Holloway moving left when the puck went right. Clean.
Holloway tapped the ice with his blocker. Acknowledgment.
Markel said nothing.
That was his signal now. It meant the thing you were doing had become expected, the highest compliment his system offered.
Trade deadline morning arrived, with the tension of knowing some names wouldn’t be on the board tomorrow.
Varga was quiet. That alone was seismic. He sat scrolling his phone with both thumbs, no monologue in progress. Twice he started to speak and stopped.
Rook dressed at his usual pace. Methodical. Unbothered. He taped his stick with the precision he'd use in July.
I pulled my socks on. Left, then right. Shin guards, Velcro tight. My phone sat on the shelf above my helmet, screen face down—superstition, not strategy. On deadline days, phones were grenades. One notification could rearrange the room.
I reached for my stick tape. Peeled back the edge with my thumbnail and started wrapping the blade. Heel to toe, half-overlap, same tension I'd used since Danny taught me the method in October.
Halfway through the wrap, the phone buzzed on the shelf above my helmet. I didn't reach for it.
My hands were mid-wrap, and the tape needed two more passes to reach the toe. I finished the blade. Cut the tape with my teeth. Ran my thumb along the edge to check for bubbles.
