Thirty-one in his crease stopping twenty-seven of thirty-one. Four got through. I know which one cost him — I watched his face after the second period goal, the micro-hesitation, the way his hand came up after like he was checking something. I know what that is. He knows I know.
After the buzzer I find him in the weight room. Not the tunnel. The weight room, lights half up, gear half off, alone with the kind of quiet a man needs after a night like that. His right hand moving — rolling the shoulder, checking the ghost.
I stand in the doorway long enough that he knows I’m there.
He doesn’t look up.
“Two of them were the ghost,” he says.
“I know.”
“Two were just hockey.”
“I know that too.”
He looks up then.
Camera down.
“Two more,” I say.
He looks at me — not the press conference look, not the crease look, just him, like I’m the only fixed point in a room that’s still processing a hard night.
“Two more,” he agrees.
The series. And everything else. Neither of us says the rest of it.
I head home.
The apartment is quiet. I sit on the step outside and Dina comes. Eats. Doesn’t look at me. I sit above her the way I always do — patient with something that moves on its own schedule and has never once adjusted it for me.
Tonight she finishes eating and doesn’t disappear immediately.
She sits. Tail wrapped around her feet. Looking at the dark.
I look at the dark too.
Then she goes.
I go inside. Open my notebook. Find the page where I wrote the word small, near the margin, the way you write something you’re not sure you meant yet.
I tear it out.
Start a new page.
Write it in the middle. Not small. My actual handwriting — the fast slightly slanted kind I use when I’m done being careful.
Stay.
Just the word. On the page. In my handwriting.
I look at it.
It looks right. It looks terrifying. It looks like the thing I’ve been circling for months without landing on.
It looks like staying.
I close the notebook.
