“I’m telling you I want to play it right.” And here’s where I quit being a kid in his chair and start being a man making a case, because this is the only language Bart Linwood speaks. “I finish my season. I get the degree in my pocket, so it’s done, and nobody can ever take it back. I protect against an injury at the wrong time on a deal that isn’t even signed. And I go pro in the fall, on a timeline that’s mine — instead of getting yanked up mid-season to plug a hole on a wing because they’re banged up and desperate. I’m not turning down the NHL, Coach. I’m choosing when I walk into it. That’s not sentiment. That’s the long game, played smart, and you taught half this league how to play it.”
Bart looks at me for a long moment.
He drinks.
“Okay,” he says, grudgingly. The one word a hockey man gives another hockey man when he walked in braced to hear feelings and got handed a plan.
And now the careful part. The part I flew all the way here to say.
“I need you to hear one more thing, Coach, because I don’t think it’s reached you straight.” I keep my eyes on his. “Aspen had nothing to do with this decision. She didn’t ask me to stay. She didn’t talk me into a single thing. She isn’t the reason, and she isn’t a factor in the timeline. I made this call about my careerby myself, for myself, the way I just laid it out for you. She didn’t even know I’d declined until it was already done.” I breathe. “Whatever’s reached you about her being mixed up in it — she wasn’t. This one was all me.”
I don’t say the rest. I don’t say so quit telling her she’s ruining my future. I don’t say your text or whatever it was put my girl through a wall on Friday. I don’t lecture the man about a thing he doesn’t know he did. I just set the truth down on the table between us — she had no hand in it — and I watch it do the work because once the decision was only ever mine, there is nowhere left for Aspen is costing him his career to stand.
Carolyn’s hand finds her husband’s shoulder. She got there before he did. I get the feeling she always does.
Bart doesn’t say anything. But something shifts behind the stillness, and I know him well enough to know he understands.
I check the time, because I have to. Because there’s a plane.
“I have to go, Coach. I’m sorry. I wish I had longer, but I told you I wouldn’t take your whole night.” I stand. And then, because I didn’t fly across a country to leave the most important thing unsaid, “Before I go. I want to ask you something, and I want to ask it the right way this time — because this time it’s real.”
He waits.
“Do I have your blessing?”
“My blessing.” He says it slow, turning it over in his mouth. “For what. She dumped you. Fake or otherwise.”
“Not to have her. That’s not mine to ask for, and it’s not yours to give — that part’s hers, all of it, whenever and if ever she decides to give it.” I make myself hold his eyes. “I’m asking your blessing to go after her. Seriously, this time. In the open, no lies, the way I should’ve done from the first day instead of the way we did. I’m going to try to win your daughter for real, Coach. I’d like to do it with your blessing.”
The stillness holds for a long time.
“I don’t appreciate being lied to,” Bart says at last. “Weeks. In my own home. At my own table, with my own family, while I poured you a drink and called you a good kid.” No give in it at all. “You let me believe a thing that wasn’t true. You let my wife believe it. You let me stand up at Thanksgiving and—” He stops. Takes the hit and hands it to me. “That was a coward’s way to do it, son. I think you know that. Or you wouldn’t be on my couch on a Sunday night with a red-eye to catch.”
“Yes, sir.” I take it. All of it. I don’t flinch, and I don’t explain. “You’re right.”
He looks at me a while longer. And then something behind the stillness eases, a fraction.
“But you flew here on no notice to tell me the truth to my face and take your beating for it,” he says. “And you made a hockey decision I can respect, for hockey reasons. And—” He glances up at his wife, at Carolyn’s hand still on his shoulder, and something passes between them I’m not part of. “And my daughter has been happier these last few weeks than I’ve seen her in three years. I’m not blind. I know what put the color back in her. Lie or not.”
Three years. He noticed. I’d had Bart Linwood filed as a man who only ever watched his daughter the way he watches tape — for what she could do, never for how she was doing. I had him wrong. He’s been keeping a closer count on her than I gave him credit for. He just doesn’t know what the three years are made of, and that part isn’t mine to hand him.
He sets the glass down.
“You’ve got my blessing to go after her, Stanley. The real kind, since you flew all this way to ask for the real kind.” His eyes don’t soften, but his voice comes down a degree. “Now go catch your plane. And son—” I stop at the door. “Don’t make me regret being decent about this. Do it right this time.”
“Yes, Coach.”
I walk out of the house of the man who’s been the next thing to a father to me my whole life, having told him the worst truth I had and taken every hit he threw and earned the thing I came for. I’ve got a red-eye to catch, a long way left to go, and a girl back home who doesn’t know yet what I have planned.
Chapter 38
Aspen
My phone rings late on Sunday night, and it’s my father. I stare at the screen and almost don’t answer it. I know this call. I’ve taken a thousand versions of it — the check-in, the clipped did you handle it, the instruction wearing a question’s clothes. I’m raw and wrecked. I have spent the whole weekend lying in the ruins of a thing I demolished on his word, and I do not have it in me tonight to be his soldier reporting in from the field. My thumb hovers over the screen.
I answer it because there’s no world where I don’t.
“Hi, Dad.”
