Hildy presses her hand to her mouth again.
“She signed it.”
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Lenzin
The Bears did not win the Cup.
For every other season in my lifetime, that was what mattered the most. It would have felt like the only thing that mattered. Championships are what we train for, bleed for, and spend entire winters chasing. But when the final horn sounded and the season ended, the loss did not burden me with fear that my career would end and that I would have to return to Germany. Because somewhere along the way, the season had stopped being only about hockey.
We lost the Cup, and somehow, many of us gained something much more important.
The locker room this season became something different. The usual competitiveness was still there, the drive, the long practices and endless travel, but underneath it, something else had grown. Loyalty, the kind that stretched beyond the ice. We were not just teammates by the end of it; we were family, and that word stopped being something people threw around lightly.
Less than four months after that night on the highway, after the call from Erin and the email that made Hildy cry so hard I pulled the car over, our lives rearranged themselves completely.
Lucy Sullivan became Lucy Sullivan Faulker von Hohenwald. She was officially, legally, and irrevocably ours, and we were hers.
The courtroom itself had been quiet, almost strangely ordinary for something that felt so monumental. Lucy sat between us, swinging her feet and holding the rabbit Oma had given her, in the most adorable little green dress. And then the team entered, and yeah, I got choked up.
When the judge finished speaking, Lucy looked down at her arm, no cast, nothing broken, not anymore. The break that had first pulled Hildy into Lucy’s life had healed long before, but the absence of it still felt symbolic somehow. Seeing her peace that together, astonishing.
Lucy flexed her fingers once, then looked up at us with complete seriousness. “So, I stay forever?”
Hildy had cried then, so did I, and yeah, half the team and all the WAGS.
Lucy still calls it the day she got her “forever paper.”
For us, it was the day Lucy officially became our first daughter.
What we did not do before that hearing was get married. Hildy had been firm about it from the beginning.
“My doctorate will have my maiden name,” she had told me, and I respected that, still do, I love her even more for it.
The independence, the pride she carries in the work she has done, the life she had built before me. I never wanted to take that from her, even by happenstance.
But as we got closer to the twins’ birth, she changed her mind; she wanted us to be married, so we all shared the samelast name. She also decided that she and Lucy would both have Sullivan as their middle name, a nod to their sharedhistory.
We exchanged vows in the same hotel where we met, the place that had quietly become the starting point of everything. The ballroom had been rearranged into something warm and intimate, rather than grand. Friends filled the space, rather than distant relatives who received formal invitations and felt obligated to attend. We didn’t want that; we wantedfamily.
Teammates, coaches, a few professors from Hildy’s program, and her old roommates. Anna stood near the front, smiling so widely I thought her face might split in half, and Lucy wore a little white dress and carried the rabbit and Axel in a white basket, as if it were the most important responsibility in the world.
When Hildy walked toward me, her hair loose and her smile soft in that way that still takes my breath away, I realized something strange and wonderful: this season will never end.
Afterward, we ate too much, laughed too loudly, and Lucy fell asleep in Anna’s lap while half the team debated whether the hotel piano could survive being played by professional hockey players. It was perfect.
One week later, our sons arrived. Elias first, and then Samuel.
Two small lives that instantly rearranged the gravity of the entire room the moment they cried for the first time. We named them for the people who came before us.People who opened doors for others.
Elias, for the brother Grossmutter had lost. Samuel, for the cousin who never came home from the war he was forced to join, wore a uniform he despised and risked his life to help people reach the estate to hide.
She had cried when we told her. Now, a month later, we are finally keeping the promise we made.
The car rolls slowly forward as the iron gates open.
