“We can tighten tolerances on the next round,” Wren adds. Her voice is calm. The same mouth that had been anything but calm last night, gasping my name.
Stop. Brain: off. Pants: behave.
My fingers tighten on the armrests.
Feldman glances over, catches me staring at Wren like a man in a desert looking at the last glass of water on earth, and raises one eyebrow. He doesn’t comment.
“I think you’re missing something,” Feldman says, still looking at me as if ordering me to pull myself together.
I breathe in deeply and nod. Wren’s and Theo’s heads snap toward him.
“You’re treating this like a class project,” Feldman continues. “The data, the write-up, the presentation—fine. But this?” He taps the CAD render pinned to his bulletin board. “This is more than fine. If you keep going, this could become real.”
“Real how?” I ask, even though my chest has already gone tight.
“Patent. Licensing. Maybe a startup down the line. Something that outlives your grade.”
Startup.
The word doesn’t land clean. It hits sideways—unexpected, destabilizing—like taking a check you didn’t see coming.
The room seems to tilt. The whiteboard blurs at the edges. Even the warmth of Wren’s knee against mine feelssuddenly out of place, as if I’m standing in the wrong life for half a second.
This isn’t a plan clicking into place.
It’s an interruption.
My whole life, people have seen one thing when they look at me: a hockey player. O’Connor bloodline. Captain’s little brother. Future draft pick.
End of story.
Coaches see my shot. Scouts see my speed. Teammates see the highlight reel.
Feldman looks at a prototype I built in a machine shop and sees something that doesn’t care about my season.
A company.
Not a dream—an intrusion.
The unsettling realization isn’t that Iwantit. It’s that it exists at all. That there’s a version of me I’ve never had to account for—and don’t have time for now.
MIT’s acceptance email flickers through my head, uninvited, and I shove it away just as fast.
Not now.
Not this season.
Hockey is real. The draft is real. Everything else is noise I don’t have the luxury to listen to. The Defenders offer sits in my future, an open door with my name already engraved on it.
That’s the life I’ve been training for. That’s the one that counts. And then, crawling up the back of all that certainty:
The bet.
Rotting behind every good thing that’s happened since the cabin.
If this explodes, it won’t just cost me Wren. It’ll cost me the version of myself the league already believes in.
It’s been a week since the holiday weekend. A week ofbeing wrapped up in her—her bed or mine, her laugh, her quiet concentration, her hands on me.
