I did the bravest thing I know how to do, and the sky still hasn’t fallen. He came to my window. He told me the truth. He’s not leaving in February. The drop keeps refusing to come.
But I have more to lose now than I ever had in my life.
Chapter 33
Stanley
You sure about this, Cup? An opportunity like that — it doesn’t come around twice.
My dad’s voice has been running on a loop since he called this morning. Since I heard him go quiet in a way my dad never goes quiet, a long, careful pause down the line, and then he said that, and it’s been playing behind my eyes ever since on a loop I can’t find the switch for.
I’m taping my stick. That’s all I’m doing. The room’s loud around me, the way it always is before a home game — Walsh has the music going this time, somebody’s chirping somebody about somebody’s sister, Rowan’s getting dressed beside me, and for the first time, I’m not anywhere in it. Not running it. Not the loud one. I’m sitting in my stall taping my stick — the one Aspen swiped off me and made me beg for it back, like she does. I have my head down, somewhere on the wrong side of a time zone and the wrong side of my own father’s silence.
The one thing holding me to the floor is that she’ll be in the family section tonight where the people who belong to us sit. Ikeep coming back to it. She’ll be there. I don’t look too hard at why that’s the thing steadying me — why a woman I’ve been carefully not-calling-anything has turned into the fixed point I’m using to find north. I just tape the stick.
The boys have been on me about the trip all day.
What was Halifax like? What’d they say? Are you signing? What’s the deal? The room’s been picking at it since I got back, and I’ve handed them the version that’s true and boring. Summit. Speakers. Suits and coffee and a building full of hockey men in lanyards. All of it real. None of it the part that matters.
I have not told one single person in this room that Aspen was there.
It’s nobody’s business. The real reason is that I keep the things that matter safe by not putting them in the air where the room can get its hands on them. The boys know that’s been a fake thing. What they don’t know is how far it’s gone. So far that it’s not fake anymore.
My phone goes off in my stall, and the screen says Coach Linwood. I look at it twice to be sure. Because the man has his own game tonight. His own building, his own bench, puck drop in a couple of hours — and he’s calling me.Me.I step out into the hall to take it.
“Stanley.” That voice. Unfortunately, I know it. “One minute. That’s all I need.”
“For you, Coach, always.”
He keeps it short. He’s never wasted a sentence in his life. And the shape of what he says is the same shape my father made this morning, just blunter, because Bart Linwood has never once softened a thing he meant.
“I heard you turned it down. I’ll say this one time, and then I’ll leave it alone — a door like that doesn’t open twice, son, and loyalty is a beautiful thing right up until the day it costs youa career. Don’t let sentiment make this call for you. You’re too good to be sentimental.”
Then he tells me to play well, and he’s gone, off to coach his own game, and I’m standing in a cinderblock hallway holding a phone that’s gone dark. That’s both of them now. My father and the man who’s been the next thing to a father my whole life agree that I made a mistake.
I don’t go back in right away, but Benson walks out and stops in front of me without saying anything.
“Halifax offered me now,” I finally admit to him. “Sign and come down for their playoff push. I told them no.”
Benson looks at me for a second. He’s not a guy who reacts big.
“You said no to the NHL,” he says. “Right now. You turned it down.”
“I said next fall.”
“Stan.” Captain-flat, the realist coming up under the friend. “You don’t do that. Nobody does that. You sign that. I’d have signed it on the bench in the second period.” Then he pauses because he doesn’t know how to act when I’m not cracking a joke. “You good?”
And there it is. Three of them. My dad, Coach, and now my captain — everyone of them looking at the same play and watching me make the wrong read on it. And the only person on this earth who thinks I got it right is me, and my certainty is down to about sixty percent and falling.
So I do the thing. I put the grin back on — first time it’s been on all day — and I shove the rest of it down underneath it.
“Of course, I’m good. I’m a delight.” I clap him on the arm. “Now quit trying to get in my head before puck drop, Reeve, it’s transparent and it’s rude.”
He doesn’t buy a word of it. But he lets me have it, the way he always lets me have it, and knocks his fist against my chest and heads back in to finish getting ready.
And the doubt’s still in me, all three voices of it, but it’s not sitting cold anymore. It’s lit. I’m not going to argue with any of them. I’m going to go put it on the ice.
The game gives me somewhere to set it down, which is the one thing the game has always reliably done.
