I pulled into my parking garage and turned off the engine.
My car ticked as the engine cooled. Somewhere above me, the elevator hummed.
I thought about Abbott leaving.
I let myself think about it—really think about it. I thought about what this team would feel like without him in it. I thought about Korean barbecue dinners with an empty seat. I thought about practice where the backup net held someone else's pads. I thought about locker room conversations where the quiet observer in the corner was a stranger who didn't know how my attention felt when it landed on them.
I thought about the mug. The blue one sitting on the shelf in its spot, front row, handle angled right. I thought about washing it and putting it back, knowing that the person it was for was in Denver, playing sixty games a season, making saves in a building I'd never been to.
I thought about the sound of my own voice in the hotel room, congratulating him.
I thought about the car, weeks ago.You ever get tired of being good at something that doesn't actually get you what you want?
I hadn't known what I meant when I asked it.
I knew now.
What I wanted was Clay Abbott. I wanted him as the person who took care of me, as the person I came home to, as the answer to every question I'd been too afraid to ask myself.
I'd been in love with him for years. I'd made my peace with it and built a good life around it and told myself it was enough—and it had been enough.
But now it wasn't. He was leaving and I was sitting in a parking garage at 11 PM knowing—irreversibly knowing—that the peace I'd made was a lie I'd told myself so well I'd believed it.
I sat in the car for ten minutes. I was not falling apart.
I went upstairs into my apartment. I stood in the kitchen and looked at the mug. For the first time since I'd put it on the shelf, I understood why I couldn't put it away.
Because putting it away meant it was over. It meant the possibility was closed, the space on the shelf, the space in my life that was shaped like Clay Abbott, was being voluntarily emptied.
And I wasn't capable of that—not because I was weak, but because the person who filled it was real, and the wanting that I'd spent years calling friendship was the biggest, most obvious truth I'd ever failed to acknowledge.
I stood in my kitchen with my hands on the counter and my head down. I breathed through the dull ache of having been wrong about myself for a very long time.
Then I picked up my phone and called Luca Moretti.
He answered on the second ring.
There was a long silence, the kind that existed between two men who had been through enough together that the silence itself was communication.
"I know," Luca said softly.
My throat closed.
"I've known since Game 3 of the playoffs two years ago." His voice was calm and certain. He'd been waiting for me to call. "You dove for a puck in the corner. Abbott stood up at the bench. I was on the ice—I saw it."
"He stood up."
"He stood up. It was the fastest I've ever seen a backup goalie move. There was no physical reason for it. You were thirty feet from the net. There was no play to make. He just—stood up."
I sank slowly onto my kitchen floor until I was sitting against the cabinets with my knees up and the phone pressed to my ear. The mug on the shelf sat above me like a third person in the conversation.
"What do I do?" I asked. My voice was so small.
Luca was quiet for a moment.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"When?"
