That’s exactly the thing I needed but didn’t want.
I give him a grin. “Everything I do is real, Reeve.”
He just looks at me.
It’s thinner than usual, the deflection, and we both hear exactly how thin, and he lets it go anyway because he’s my best friend and can see I’m already not okay.
“Don’t let it fuck with the draft.” He points in the direction of the whiteboard. “House rules.”
Then he’s gone, back into the noise, and I’m standing in my own kitchen holding a cup of water, and three doors down, the realest thing I’ve done in years is not talking to me and isn’t coming back tonight.
Saturday, we play, and I spend the warmup not looking at the family section, and then I look anyway. Melly’s there. Gianna’s there. Lucy’s there. Mara, Mila, and Penelope are there. The seat between Melly and Gianna is empty. She didn’t come. I play fine. We lose. I don’t remember a second of it. That’s when I know I didn’t just rattle something loose on that sidewalk. I broke it.
Monday morning, my agent calls, and the timing is either a mercy or a joke.
“Halifax wants you in a room,” Marchetti says. “Nothing formal — dev staff, the scout who drafted you, probably the assistant GM pokes his head in. A get-to-know-you. And the timing’s perfect, because the league’s analytics and ops conference is in their city Wednesday and Thursday — same one every year, half the front offices in the league send people — so the Halifax brass is all in town anyway. I slotted you Thursdaymorning around it. Fly in Wednesday, sit down Thursday, and home Thursday night for your Friday game. Clean.”
And underneath the logistics sits the entire rest of my life. Because this is part of how it gets decided — sign now, take the entry-level deal, turn pro, and go. The biggest call I will ever make, and this meeting’s a piece of it: a room of people in good suits deciding whether the kid they drafted is ready. This is supposed to be the most important meeting of my life.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Book it. I’m in.”
I grab it with both hands, and not because I’m calm. I grab it because hockey is the one room in my whole life that has never confused me for a second. Every other room right now is static — the street, the silence, the photo, the I can’t. Hockey is the one place I always know where the puck’s going. I need somewhere to stand that makes sense.
Halifax is somewhere to stand.
That week, I’m at the rink like I moved in.
Extra reps, extra video, staying late to take pucks off the wall until my hands quit shaking from something that isn’t the work. Locked in, I tell the boys. Locked in for Halifax. They buy it, or they’re kind enough to pretend, which from this crew comes out about the same.
And I’ve gotten nothing from her. It’s been days. I haven’t texted her, she hasn’t texted me, and I keep doing the thing I’d sworn I wouldn’t. I open her name, sit there with the empty box, type something, read it, delete it, and put the phone down. I have no idea what I’m doing. I tell myself the silence is fine. She needs room. I dumped the truth on her in the cold, and the truth’s out there now. The next move is hers, and I’m not going to crowd her. I’m focused on Halifax.
The night before I fly, Percy catches me staying late again, alone, taking pucks off the wall in a building that wants to close. He doesn’t say anything. Percy never says anything. He skatesover, dumps a fresh bucket of pucks at my feet so I don’t have to keep going back for them, taps me once on the shin pad with the toe of his stick, and skates off to the far end to do his own thing.
That’s the whole conversation. I see you white-knuckling it. I’m not going to make you talk about it. Here’s a bucket of pucks.
I shoot until they turn the lights down on me.
On Wednesday, I fly.
Flying’s easy. It’s the easiest thing I do all week. Headphones in, a man on a business trip, a folder of Halifax material open on the tray table that I get about a third through before I give up and watch the clouds. Nobody on a plane needs anything from me. Nobody on a plane has kissed me in the cold and then walked away from me. I could do this forever.
I catch a cab to the hotel my agent booked — a big glass tower downtown, the kind of place a club puts you when it’s trying to make an impression. I don’t think twice about it. Marchetti mentioned a conference, so the building is probably stuffed with half the league’s hockey-ops people. It’s cool, but I’m tired, and I want to put my bag down and lie flat before tomorrow eats me.
I walk into the lobby with my duffel on my shoulder.
My heart races out of control.
Aspen Linwood is standing at the front desk. Roller bag parked at her heel. ID out, checking in, her hair down, in a coat I’ve never seen — twenty feet away, in a hotel four hundred miles from home, five days after she fisted both hands in my shirt and kissed me back and then told me she couldn’t.
I stand there with my bag on my shoulder, and my brain runs the exact sequence it ran on the sidewalk — all the data, no read, two facts that refuse to share a sentence. Why is she here? How is she here? She works for my dad’s club. Not Halifax. There is no reason on this earth for Aspen Linwood to be in this city, let alone this lobby, let alone at the one desk in the one hotel myagent dropped me into for the most important meeting of my life. I run it, and it won’t resolve.
She hasn’t seen me yet.
I’m standing in the middle of a hotel lobby — gutted, stunned, and baffled. What the fuck am I supposed to do?
She signs the screen.
She picks up her bag.
