But instead of reacting from instinct, I thought about the footage and the tag she’d used. She’d isolated the pattern and shown me where the mistake would happen.
A half-second falter on my part was all it took.
The forward got through, and the puck came across in a solid pass. Their winger buried it in the goal.
I skated back to position and reset, not letting my dismay show on my face or in my posture. I was a professional. You didn’t let one mistake compound into two. But I knew what had happened. I’d thought knowing would be enough, that understanding the pattern would translate to stopping it.
It hadn’t.
I spent the rest of the period between the bench and my shifts, recalibrating. I played more conservatively than I wanted to. My reads were still accurate, but I was protecting instead of organizing. Reacting instead of anticipating.
We didn’t score.
The third period delivered more of the same. My positioning remained technically correct, but the instinct that made me useful had pulled back into something safer. Something cautious.
The final horn sounded, and we lost by two goals.
I hadn’t looked at the press area after the freeze, and I didn’t look at it now as I skated to the edge of the ice and strode down the tunnel.
Locker rooms after a loss were always quiet. Exhibition games didn’t carry the same weight as regular season, but they counted to the people in this room. The silence squeezed around me, heavy in a way that didn’t need volume.
I sat at my stall and stripped off my gear. Sweaty jersey. Shoulder and elbow pads. The routine was automatic enough that my hands could work while my brain stayed somewhere else.
Players decompressed in their various ways. Some talked while others didn’t. Mikael made a joke that landed wrong and stopped trying. The rookies kept their heads down. Brashe sat three stalls over and said nothing. Across the room, Crim had already showered and was half-dressed. He glanced at me once, then away.
I showered and changed into the suit I wore to make sure the team looked good to the press. I spoke only when someone asked me a direct question that required an answer.
Two players glanced at me on the way out. Then at the door. They’d seen something and were choosing not to turn it into a conversation yet.
Quiet ruled on the bus during the ride to the new hotel. We were all exhausted; the adrenaline was gone. What remained was the reality of the loss and the individual analysis of what had gone wrong.
I took a different seat. Not the one behind her. Closer to the back, away from the overhead lights and the shape of the back of her head that I’d spent hours memorizing.
She was visible anyway. Five rows up, aisle seat. Her laptop open. I couldn’t tell if she was working or just staring at the screen, and I didn’t let myself look long enough to find out.
She’d been in the box. She’d seen the sequence unfold in real time, the same one she’d isolated in tape. She would’ve tagged this mistake. I didn’t let myself think about what label she’d use.
During the morning ride, I’d sat behind her and felt the pull of her like something gravitational. Hours of highway with her nearby, and I’d pretended I was thinking about hockey. Now I sat five rows back and stared out the window at nothing, and the absence of that warmth was another problem I added to the others.
The bus pulled into the hotel lot, and we filed off. I went to my room and ordered food I didn’t want. I ate half of it because my body needed fuel regardless of what my brain was doing.
Then I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall.
The game ran on repeat in my mind. Not the full sixty minutes, just the six seconds that mattered. The forward cutting. The recognition. The half-second where I’d thought instead of reacted. The goal.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling, the hotel version of the same ceiling I’d been staring at since moving to Boston. It was a different room, but still the same problem.
At some point I stopped waiting for sleep and accepted that it wasn’t coming. The ceiling had nothing left to offer. Stillness was making it worse.
I got up, pulled on shorts and a shirt, and left the room.
She stood in the hallway, outside the ice machine alcove across the way, a bucket in her hand, wearing the clothes she’d traveled in. She looked up when my door opened.
We didn’t move.
I wore gym clothes. It wasn’t a difficult read where I was going.
With a nod, I boarded the elevator and rode it down.
