It is not a criticism of them; it is just the water I have always swum in.
And then there is Iris O’Shea, who walked into a building that did not want her and has not given a single inch of ground all morning. Not to the chirps, the cold, a coach with a jaw like a closing door, and the novelty of it is doing something to me I do not have the vocabulary for.
Nor would I say out loud if I did.
The clock on the far wall reads thirty seconds, and our sector still has nothing on the board, and that simply will not do.
I decide to take the lead.
It is the kind of decision I make often and apologize for rarely, and I make it knowing Jude will read my body before I have finished committing to it and back the play without needing a word, because that is what eighteen years of knowing a man buys you. A bad pass coughs the puck loose near the boards, one of the opposing-sector defensemen completely whiffing his read, and I am on it before it has finished feeling sorry for itself.
And here, briefly, is my professional complaint.
The men we are scrimmaging against, the other half of this fractured team, are playing defense like it personally insulted them this morning. Sloppy gaps. Lazy sticks. Bodies a full beat behind where bodies need to be. We are going to have to fix that, all of it, before this club plays anyone who matters, and I file thethought even as I am gliding straight through the evidence of it, slipping the first checker like he is a traffic cone someone left out.
I send it to Jude.
He is already moving; the captain’s curse and gift.
He takes my pass in stride and eats up ice the way he eats up everything,unhurried and total, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch Rémi sliding into the high lane behind us. The picture assembles itself in my head all at once, gorgeous and obvious.
The three of us.
The puck.
One last goal in the final breath of the rounds, stitched together by the men who are supposed to be the spine of this team, right in front of a coach who needs reminding why he keeps us.
Jude drops it to Rémi, who does what Rémi does best: make a complicated thing look like a decision the puck made on its own, absorbing a lazy stick-check without so much as a hitch and feathering the puck back to Jude at the precise instant the lane cracks open. Jude does not even look at me. He does not have to. He sends it across, hard and flat and perfect, onto my tape in the one pocket of ice where I can do something unforgivable with it.
I see the opening. Glove side, high, a window the size of a mail slot.
And I hit it with far too much force for a practice round.
I know it the instant it leaves my blade.
The puck does not travel so much as depart, a black blur with somewhere urgent to be. It is absolutely going in, and I have already started the small private celebration in my chest, the one with the fireworks and the brass section, because there is no human alive who reaches that.
Then the human alive materializes directly in its path.
She does not glide into the spot. There is no time to glide. One blink, she is set deep in her crease, and the next, she has simplyarrived, flung her whole compact body across the lane on pure instinct and faith, and the puck buries itself in her.
Low. Center mass. In a region of the human anatomy that makes every man on the ice produce the exact same noise at the same time;a collective, involuntary, full-throated wince that you could have scored for orchestra.
For a suspended, surreal half-second, the puck seems to hang there against her, weightless, glued to the spot by sheer disbelief, before gravity remembers its job and it drops and clatters dead to the ice.
Nobody moves.
The silence that pours into the rink is enormous and total, the kind of quiet that has texture, that presses on the ears. Twenty-some men frozen mid-stride. The clock blinking down its meaningless final seconds.
And me, I become aware, gawking at her in open horror with my jaw somewhere down around my collarbone, in the precise pose as half the team, because every cell I own is screaming a single useless question, which ishow is she still standing.
She’s still standing there, apparently, made of something the rest of us are not.
She must feel the staring, because she lets out a sigh that I can see more than hear, a long-suffering rise and fall of her shoulder pads, and then she reaches up and pulls off her helmet.
The face underneath it stops the rest of my brain cold.
Sweat has plastered loose pink strands flat against her temple and her jaw, gone dark rose where they cling, and her cheeks are flushed that wind-scrubbed color. She looks tired, damp, and faintly disgusted with all of us, and she is, somehow, in that exact unglamorous state, the most stunning thing I have seen in a building full of expensive things.
