“Which takes your mind off everything,” I pointed out.
“Fuck!” Leroy slammed the papers into his stall, but they ricocheted and fell on the floor. “She got me again! She’s a fucking witch!”
I picked up the papers to keep them from getting wet on the soggy floor. Though, who knows, maybe that would yield him another punishment, which would help to calm and center him. Meh, I was nosy. And something familiar caught my eye.
It was a business plan for something called SoUPCYCLE. And the names across the top?
Mara O’Connell Leroy
Emma Corrigan
Emma and Mara had put together a business plan? I read on, and it was brilliant. It was a systematized version of what Emma did with the leftover food at work. They’d set it up as a non-profit and it could serve communities wherever someone decided to open a hub.
I clamped my jaw and a deep sense of pride took over. That was my Emma: compassionate, smart, logical.
And I’d be an absolute fool to walk away from her.
FORTY-TWO
HARLAN
JUNE
We wentinto the second period tied at 1. It was still very much anybody’s game.
Anybody’s cup.
Oberbeck was playing better than I’d ever seen him, and I could tell he was locked all the way in. I was doing my best to do the same, to stay in, to know the game was important but it was also just another game.
That’s when everything started going to shit.
Korowski got slashed, and it must have been a moral defeat, because our power play team was the sloppiest I’d seen them in a long time.
In fact, they turned the puck over, and Miknevicius headed my way to try for a shortie.
I got into position. I’d taken him in a shootout. Surely I could handle him on a breakaway. I prepared, going the way he’d gone in our shootout.
But at the last second, he switched sides and popped the puck over my shoulder to the top of the net.
2 to 1, and we failed to score in the remaining minute of the power play.
After that, the guys just seemed tired. L.A. created a screen in front of my crease and got another one past me through traffic.
3 to 1, and only twenty minutes remaining to turn it around.
Sorrento stood at the gate, ushering everyone off the ice. He shouted a “let’s go!” at every one of us, following behind me and shaking my shoulders on my way back down the tunnel.
“Doing great, Royce. Shake it off.”
Things were tense in the locker room. I might have been imagining it, but I felt like no one wanted to look at me. Cordero squeezed my shoulder while I took a break from my pads. “You’re doing it. You got this.”
“I feel like it should be you,” I said, almost embarrassed to look up at him.
He shook his head. “Nope. It’s your turn. I know you’ve got this one.”
“What if I don’t get it? Everyone’s going to hate me.”
“They won’t. Because you’ve got it.”
