I was here before this banner existed. Before anyone outside Canyon Bay believed it could. Back when this building was still just a place I knew how to leave.
Neither of us says anything about it.
We don’t have to.
It’s right there.
Game 5 morning.
His kitchen. My coffee. Brick doing the weaving thing between my feet like he’s been doing it for months, which he has.
Jax is at the counter reading something on his phone that makes him set it face down after three seconds.
“Hendricks again?” I say.
“Hendricks again.”
“What’d he say this time.”
“That our goalie is playing above his level and will regress to the mean in a decisive game.” He picks up his coffee. “Saved it.”
“For the folder.”
“Folder’s full. New document.”
I look at him over my coffee. There’s this specific feeling — watching a man be exactly who he is, all this time, and still getsyou. The certainty of him. The way he files things without drama. The way he just — keeps going.
“You’re going to win tonight,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Not a question,” I say.
The corner of his mouth. “Keep it.”
I keep it.
I bring both notebooks to the game.
The professional one and the personal one. I set them side by side in the press box and look at them for a second — the whole season sitting in two small notebooks. Both of them mine. I stopped pretending one of them doesn’t count somewhere around month three.
I pick up my camera and go to work.
I do my job. Liam’s face between periods. Aurora in the family section, one hand on her belly, the other over her mouth. Brody doing something inadvisable in the defensive zone.
And Jax.
Thirty-one in his crease. Stopping everything. The ghost quiet — I can tell by the ease of him, the absence of that micro-hesitation I’ve been watching for months.
The building isn’t holding its breath anymore. It’s exhaling.
The Cyclones win Game 5 3-1.
Series is 3–2 now. One more game.
After the buzzer the celebration erupts and I photograph it — the bench, the ice, the families section — and I’m doing my job and then I stop doing my job because he’s looking for me.
Not the way he used to look for me. Not the scan, the checking, the early-months habit of having to confirm I was still there. Just — his eyes coming up and finding mine the way they always do now, like it’s not a search anymore, like it’s just where he looks.
