I think about that for exactly as long as I can stand it.
And then I push it away, hard, because that door does not open, we do not go in there — and it is so much cleaner, so much easier, to hate the boy. The boy is a bruise. You can press a bruise. You can’t press your own father.
So I press the bruise.
My hand is shaking too badly to type now, so I put the phone in my lap and breathe.
Then Ermington does something on the forecheck I’d note in any other game, some lazy-genius little stick lift that strips a defenseman clean. I pick the phone back up. Because I am a professional.
I don’t realize when it happens, but I’m not watching hockey anymore. I think about what I could do. Nothing public. I’m not a woman who makes scenes. Scenes are for people who’vealready lost control of the room. Nothing actionable. I would never in a million years damage his career.
It doesn’t have to be anything big.
But it has to besomething.
Something small. Something stupid. Something he will know — instantly, with total certainty — that it was me, and not be able to do a single thing about.
The idea forms slowly, and I think I know just the thing.
The buzzer goes. The building loses its mind because Ermington just got another score two seconds ago. The boys mob him at center ice, a pile of them, helmets off, and he comes up out of it grinning and soaked and twenty feet tall. He’s not looking at me –– his point was already made.
I got my eye on you, Ermington.
I stand up and walk.
I know the security guard by his face, and he knows mine. I know the photographers crouched at the tunnel. I know the family entrance, the press level, the way the corridors curl around the bowl, and the staging room behind the home bench where the equipment manager racks the sticks while the team is still out on the ice, grinding through the handshake line.
I also know that he won’t be in the locker room for another five minutes. That’s all I need.
I lift two fingers at a faculty member from the athletics office. Great game. I let them see exactly the girl they expect to see — NHL coach’s daughter, ops assistant, here in some official-adjacent capacity, nothing to look at twice.
Nobody looks at me twice.
I walk until I reach the home rack. I find the slot for eleven.
He’s got a whole row of hockey sticks, and they’re not the cheap kind. I can thank my father for knowing that detail. I noticed that he switched to a fresh one for the third period,which means this, the one that scored, the one that mocked me, is the gamer. The one he reaches for. The one he’ll miss.
I touch it and immediately wonder if I’m out of my damn mind.
This is insane. Put it down, walk away, write the report, and don’t do this. What the hell are you thinking? He is going to freak out.
I lift it off the rack because that’s exactly what I want.
I don’t pause again. I tuck it against my side and walk out the same way I walked in.
I smile at the guard on my way through the gate.
“Thanks for getting that for me,” I tell him as he holds the door open.
I step out into the cold with Stanley Ermington’s hockey stick in my hand, and a euphoric happiness calms me. My hands stop shaking. Nobody caught me. If anyone asks, I’ve known Ermington since we were babies.
In my car, I lay the stick across the back seat.
I watch it in the rearview mirror while the heat rises and the windows clear. This long black hockey stick lying across my leather seats like it pulled up a chair, Ermington facing the wrong way, so all I can see is the blade he scored with, and I feel something I have not done all night, which is smile.
Hawthorne Street is quiet when I pass the hockey house, but I’d put money on a party starting inside it within the hour, because God forbid that house take a single weekend off.
I don’t look as I drive by.
