"It's also three thousand years old, so it had time to workshop."
That got him. Not a laugh. Walsh didn't seem like a man who laughed easily or often, but a sound. A surprised exhalation through his nose, almost involuntary.
"Can't sleep either?" he asked after a few minutes. "Or just a really dedicated tea drinker?"
"Light sleeper. Always have been."
"Same. Goalies. The watchfulness doesn't shut off."
"It doesn't shut off for forwards either." I turned the mug between my palms. "You replay every goal against you, don't you? Every mistake."
He looked at me. The stove light caught his eyes. "Every single one."
"Even the ones that aren't your fault?"
"Especially those."
I nodded slowly. "I do the same thing. Except mine's turnovers. Every pass I should have made, every shot I shouldhave taken." The next part came out before I could stop it, propelled by the 3 AM honesty that stripped away my usual filters. "Every choice that blew up in my face."
The weight in those words settled between us. I hadn't meant to say that much.
Walsh didn't push. He held the silence without filling it, giving me room to decide whether to continue.
"Worst save you ever blew?" he asked instead.
I looked up, startled by the redirect. This was safe ground. Hockey, not the wreckage around it. He was offering me a door out of the room I'd accidentally walked into.
I took it.
"Junior playoffs," I said. "Game seven. Saginaw. I was playing center then — I didn't move to wing until the OHL. Kid from the other team had a wrist shot that looked like nothing. No power, bad angle. I should have been in the passing lane but I'd cheated toward the net. Puck went right through where I should have been standing. Five-hole on our goalie. Lost the series."
"How old were you?"
"Eighteen."
"That's brutal."
"My dad didn't talk to me for a week." My voice went flat. I heard it happen and couldn't stop it. "Said I'd embarrassed the family name."
Walsh's grip tightened on his mug. A small thing, the knuckles going white for half a second, but I noticed because noticing was what I did. "Your dad sounds like he had his priorities wrong."
Careful phrasing. Notyour dad sounds like an asshole.Close enough to mean it, polite enough to let me decide how to hear it.
"Yeah, well." I shrugged. The gesture felt hollow. "What about you? Worst save?"
"Two years ago. Conference finals. Montreal had this kid, fast as hell, who came down on a breakaway in overtime. I read himwrong. Committed too early, the exact thing Luca was drilling me on the night Park called. He roofed it glove-side and I wasn't even close."
"I remember that game."
He looked at me.
"You played out of your mind for sixty minutes," I said. "You made saves that should have been physically impossible. Your defense hung you out to dry all period and you just kept stopping everything. That goal wasn't on you."
The certainty in my own voice surprised me. I'd watched that game in my apartment in Minneapolis, alone on the couch at eleven at night, and I'd been angry on Walsh's behalf. Angry that his team had let him down, angry that the highlight reels would show the breakaway goal and not the thirty-eight saves that preceded it.
Walsh blinked. "You watched Storm playoff games?"
"I watch a lot of hockey." I let the corner of my mouth lift. "And you're kind of hard to miss. Six-four in the crease, making highlight-reel saves like it's effortless."
