It just feels like home.
I stand up. I go find him. The press scrum is chaos.
I move through it the way I’ve learned — credential up, camera ready, the practiced efficiency of someone who knows the geometry of a crowd. I’m looking for him and then I stop looking because he’s already coming.
Full gear. Skates on. The room parting around him the way rooms always part around him — not because he pushes, just because he takes up space with that specific certainty and people move.
He is not walking toward the cameras.
The whole room can see it. Every journalist, every photographer, Riley somewhere behind me already making notes. He is walking through the noise and the bodies and the celebration, and he knows exactly where he’s going.
I stop moving. He gets to me.
Cups my face in his hands, and looks at me.
The whole arena. The cameras. Brody watching from approximately three feet away like he just experienced complete personal vindication.
Then he kisses me.
Right there. In front of everyone. I hold onto his jersey and he holds on and the room keeps going around us — all that noise and celebration and the city losing its mind above us — and we are in the middle of it and neither of us is anywhere else. His hands in my hair. My hands fisted in thirty-one. The noise going to a frequency I stop hearing because all I can feel is him.
When he pulls back he’s looking in my eyes.
“Everyone saw that,” I say. My voice isn’t entirely steady.
“Yeah.”
“You walked through an entire arena.”
“I know where you are.” He looks at me like it’s simple. Like it has always been simple. “I know where you are.”
My face goes completely red.
I cannot help it.
I do not care.
Riley finds me after.
She’s been crying too, but she won’t say so. She hands me a coffee and stands next to me watching the celebration.
“Good season,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Good story.”
I look at her. “Which one.”
She looks at me over her coffee. Something in her face she’s never let out before. “Both,” she says.
She walks away.
I stand there with my coffee.
Both.
My professional notebook has the season. The games, the quotes, the documentary. My personal notebook has everything else — the tunnel, the ghost, the parts I wrote down because keeping them only in my chest felt impossible.
