Evan scrolled.
Gold entries. Scattered at first, weeks apart.Holloway, film review.Then closer together.Forward line debrief. Recruiting dinner: Finn’s stats prep.Evan clicked one open. His own notes:Zone exit efficiency seventy-eight percent, top third in conference.He’d circled Finn’s name twice. In the margin, in his own handwriting, three words he did not remember writing:best hands in program.
He kept scrolling. The gold was everywhere. Every week, threaded through the blue, and Evan could see it now. Not random. Arranged. By a guy who needed a system for everything, even the thing no system was built for.
Further: the clipboard notes from the game.Shoulders drop between shifts, tape job fresh, chews jersey collar when thinking.He’d crossed them out. But they were there, in his own handwriting, the evidence that his professional observation had collapsed into something else entirely and he hadn’t noticed because the collapse had happened inside the structure. It had absorbed it. Given it a color and a column and a category, and Evan had looked at fourteen entries under one player’s nameand three under everyone else’s and it had taken him until that moment to realize what he was looking at.
Evan had color-coded his own wanting and called it work.
Evan closed the laptop. Sat in the unlit office. His grip was unsteady on the desk and he let it be unsteady because there was nobody here to perform for and the performing was what had gotten him here.
He had spent fifteen years being the coach’s son. Fifteen years of measured responses and professional tone and the reflex that made his voice go flat when anyone said a name that mattered. He had built the system because it kept him safe. The calendar, the clipboard, the color codes, the hallway nod, the voice that didn’t change. He had maintained it so long and so thoroughly that he had no idea what it had cost him until he sat in an unlit office and scrolled through the evidence of the one time it had tried to tell him the truth and he’d ignored it.
Evan could hear his own voice through his father’s door.Holloway’s fine. Nothing to worry about.Peterson, Marchetti, Holloway. A list. Finn’s name third in the sequence. And on the other side of that door, Finn had been standing in the hallway listening to the guy who’d been inside him that same night turn him into a line item.
Nobody made Evan do it. No one was suspicious. No one was pressuring him. His father had asked a routine question, Evan’s lips had given a routine answer, and the reflex had done what it had always done, and the person who mattered most had heard every word of it.
And then Finn had walked to the parking lot and opened the truck door and pulled Evan in and held on too tight, too fast, and Evan had thought it was about the game. Had gone home after and textedYou okay?and gottenSureand put his phone on the nightstand and gone to sleep.
Sure.
Evan sat in the unlit office with his grip unsteady on the desk and the building empty around him and somewhere down the hall a door closed and the noise carried and faded. The gold was on the screen behind his eyelids. The gold was everywhere. The gold was the truest thing he’d ever put on a calendar, and he’d deleted it.
He had no idea how to get it back.
11
FINN
Finn came off the bench in the second period and drove the right wing at a speed that made the Michigan State defenseman take a half-step in retreat before he’d decided to. The arena cold bit at his lungs on the first stride, that crisp bite of rink air that never quite left his chest, and he used it. The boards rattled under someone’s check behind him, the crowd noise swelling and flattening in waves he registered the way he registered weather. Finn cut inside, drew both defenders toward him, dropped the puck to Hayes at the top of the circle without looking. Hayes shot. The puck rang off the post, a high clean ping that cut through the noise and hung there before the crowd groaned. Finn was already skating to the bench, reading the next shift before the current one had finished.
Weeks of this. Playing too fast and too clean and none of it was about hockey. The ice made sense in a way the rest of his life did not, and he was using it for everything it was worth.
In the press box, a man in a gray jacket leaned forward and wrote something down. Finn clocked it on his way to the bench. Kept going.
The draft was right there. Should have been the thing he wanted most. Wasn’t.
Coach Tremblay said “Good” when Finn came off. One word, which from Coach meant something.
Ashley had texted twice since the break. The notifications sat on his lock screen, and every time he set the phone down without swiping. His thumb hovered over the thread once and then he locked the screen. The old relief valve didn’t fit anymore. None of them did.
Finn took his water bottle and did not look at the operations section.
* * *
The locker room after practice smelled like rubber floor mats and weeks of accumulated gear sweat, the industrial spray they used on the boards cutting through the top of it without winning. The fluorescents buzzed at a frequency that lived just below conscious hearing. Someone had left a half-eaten granola bar on the bench between stalls. Hayes or Petrov, an argument ongoing with no resolution in sight.
Finn sat in his stall and taped his stick. He’d already taped his stick. He was re-taping it because his hands needed something to do and the blade was the most defensible option available. The white tape came off in a long strip, adhesive pulling at the composite, and he wound fresh tape from heel to toe in overlapping passes, pressing each layer flat with his thumb.
“So,” Hayes said from the stall to his left, “there’s this girl in my econ class.”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I—”
“You want to set me up.” Finn pulled the tape taut. “No.”
Hayes was grinning, one leg crossed over the other, shoulder pads on, looking like a golden retriever who’d found something dead in the yard and was bringing it home as a gift. “She’s great. You’d like her. She has opinions about hockey analytics that would genuinely piss you off, which I feel like is your type.”
