I park inside my garage, the garage door sealing the night out behind me.
I carry the hockey stick in through the front door from the garage. Bree is in the kitchen, Kirra’s right beside her, and they both glance at the stick then at me. Kirra has a glass of winehalfway to her mouth, and she’s looking at me like I have lost my entire mind, which, fair.
“Good game?” Kirra says carefully.
“It was a game,” I say and keep walking.
I feel like I’ve broken ten laws by taking his stick, and I’m joyous, maybe even giddy, as I enter my room and close the door behind me.
I lean the stick against my desk and grin. This is the bravest, most outlandish thing I’ve ever done. This — this –– is going to teach him. The stick leans right next to the framed photo of my father holding the Cup over his head.
I pick up the stick and lean it against the other wall instead, by the window, because I do not want to think about my father right now. I don’t want him in the frame for this. This one is mine, and it has nothing to do with him, and I am keeping it that way for as long as I can.
I look at it leaning there against the wall in the dark. Ermington. Number eleven. Stolen clean out of his own building, by me, while he was busy being mobbed at center ice.
Player 11. Goal. Top corner, glove side.
Stick: confiscated.
Eat that, Ermington.
Chapter 5
Stanley
The bench is empty, and the locker room’s a zoo, and I’m in the best mood of my entire life.
Two goals. A helper. The club’s man in the building watching me do exactly the thing he flew in to watch. And the move that landed so clean, I can still feel it in my teeth. Now I can enjoy a true Hawthorne House after-party with a cold beer in my warm house with my best friends.
“What did I say about the stick?” Benson calls out.
“It’s a good one,” I agree.
I’m packing my bag, half-listening to Benson talk about what it’s like to break in a stick. Speaking of sticks, I reach for my gamer where it lives on the rack.
My hand finds air.
I look.
The slot’s empty.
There’s a one-second skip in my chest, a little hitch, the kind you get when you reach for the next stair, and it isn’t there. I scan the rack. I count. I count again, slower, because counting twice ishow a reasonable person handles this. I go down the whole row, sled to sled, nameplate to nameplate. I check the floor. I duck my head into the staging area where the equipment guy racks them during the handshake line.
My favorite hockey stick is gone.
Across the room Blue’s chirping Percy about something. Mickey comes flying out of the showers screaming with a towel around his neck and nothing else. Benson’s still going about the house, and nobody notices that I’ve gone quiet. I clap Drew on the shoulder and tell him to hurry up.
I don’t tell a soul.
Because there’s only one person in this entire building who would take my stick. And she went missing as soon as the buzzer went off. Yeah, I saw her walking down the steps like a sneaky link.
I sling my bag over my shoulder, and I go home to host a party.
Damn me for switching sticks between plays. Now she has my baby.
The house fills up fast, thanks to the girlfriends of the house opening the doors before we even got to the property. The other week, Blue mentioned he wasn’t drinking, so Rowan and Percy adopted it, and now three of the Hawthorne brothers are spending the night sober.
I grab Benson by the neck and lift my beer. “Just you and me, Reeve.”
