She looks up at me. For just a second she doesn’t have anything ready. She nods once. Goes.
The house settles. Her plate is in the drying rack. She washed it without being asked. Brick on the counter where she was. Her coffee cup still there — I’m not moving it. My phone going — Aurora, Aiden, probably a group chat I don’t want to open. Not looking at it.
Game 5 tonight. Round 2. Everything we’ve built on the line. The crease mine. The ritual holding.
I look at the coffee cup. I look at the plate in the drying rack.
Yeah, I think.
Good luck with any of it.
Chapter eighteen
Nova
Blankdocument.
I’ve been staring at it for twenty minutes and I have written exactly nothing. I have been a journalist for four years and this has never happened to me before.
That’s not true. It happened once. Griffin fed me an angle and I couldn’t make it sit right on the page and I ran it anyway because the byline mattered more than the feeling in my gut that something was wrong.
I know what that feeling means now.
I close the laptop. Open it immediately like that helped. I’ve been a journalist for four years and this is apparently where we are.
The press box hums around me. Game prep happening below. The ice getting its final treatment before warmups. I have myrecorder and my notebook and my backup pen and my whole professional system fully operational and I cannot write a single word of this piece.
That’s information.
I just don’t know what to do with it yet.
The network wants the personal angle piece.
My editor has been wanting it for weeks — since the first photo of us started making the rounds — and her phone hasn’t stopped since. Biggest byline of my career sitting right there — journalist embedded with Cup contenders, the relationship that developed, exclusive access, the whole story — and all I have to do is write it.
I open the document.
Type his name.
Stop.
I’ve done this four times this morning. Four times I get as far as Jax and then I just — stop. Sit there with his name on the screen and think about the coffee cup on his counter and the shirt I’m still wearing sometimes and the thing I still haven’t told him sitting under all of it.
What exactly am I supposed to write here.
Journalist with complicated history embeds with team, falls for goalie, neglects to mention the piece she wrote two seasons ago that almost got him traded.
That’s a story.
Just not the one my editor is asking for.
I close it. The document autosaves. Great. Now it exists.
Warmups.
I pick up the Nikon because that’s what I do — camera up, lens between me and the thing I’m trying not to feel. I frame Jax in the crease. The pre-shot stillness. The blocker tape. The specific switch that flips before the first shot of the day — I’ve watched it happen enough times now that I can see it coming before it does.
I hold the frame.
