Overtime.
The United Center is deafening, eighteen thousand people on their feet and screaming hard enough that the sound punches through my helmet, into my chest, down into the ice beneath my skates. On the clock, 3:12 remains. The puck is on my stick, and Cole is two strides ahead on my left, already moving into the lane before I make the decision.
A shift of his hips. One micro-adjustment of his blade. The defender bites on the fake, and the lane opens off Cole's left shoulder. He drops his shoulder, and the pass is already leaving my stick, a hard, flat feed across the slot that reaches him at the same instant his blade hits the spot.
Cole redirects it.
The goalie reads the shot half a second too late. Net ripples, light goes red, and the horn rips through the arena. The United Center detonates around us.
Cole's arms are around me before I fully process that the puck went in. His gloves fist the back of my jersey, his helmet knocks against mine, and his breath comes rough through the cage.
Then the team piles on.
Bodies, sticks, elbows, skates, and the pile takes us down. I'm at the bottom, Cole is half on top of me, someone's elbow is in my ribs, and the ice is cold against my back while the arena shakes itself apart. A laugh breaks out of me under the weight of them.
We untangle. The team skates the victory lap with gloves raised and sticks tapping the ice, but I peel off from the group and head for the glass.
She's there.
Section 103, third row, press credential hanging around her neck and her laptop open on the seat beside her. Working. Always working. Maya Maddox covers the NHL the way she covered Briarcliff, with notes in the margins, quotes cross-checked, and every question aimed at the place the truth tries to hide.
When she sees me coming, she stands. Arms crossed. Mouth curved at the left corner, the way it does when she already knows exactly what I'm going to do. That curve gets under my ribs every damn time.
I skate to the glass and stop hard enough to send ice spraying against the boards. My glove goes up first.
She puts her hand against the glass from the other side, her palm flat against the place where my glove waits. One inch of plexiglass between us. The same barrier. The same gesture.
Her mouth forms two words.
I know what they are.
Come home.
Cole
The penthouse is quiet.
Dante is in the kitchen, knife on the cutting board, garlic sizzling in olive oil, the whole apartment smelling like Serena's kitchen even as he denies it. The man cooks Italian after every win.
I know the recipe because Serena taught it to me herself last Christmas in Milan. She stood beside me at her stove for two hours, correcting my knife work, calling me tesoro, and feeding me bites of sauce from a wooden spoon while Dante watched from the doorway looking like he had walked into an ambush and decided to let it happen.
Milan happens twice a year now. Christmas and summer, because Serena insists. Every Sunday she calls Maya, every Wednesday she calls me, and every time she has opinions about our apartment, our diet, and whether I'm getting enough sleep.
She's right about the sleep.
Maya is on the couch with her laptop open and her glasses on, wearing my Blackhawks jersey, the away white, the collar pulled sideways enough to make the twenty-six sit crooked. Somewhere around the second season, she stopped borrowing and started owning. Her closet is half our numbers now.
She's editing. The cursor moves in bursts: a flurry of keystrokes, a pause, a deletion, another flurry. That rhythm is familiar. Final pass. Her jaw is set, and the deadline clock is probably open in another tab.
"Is this the concussion piece or the expansion draft?" I ask from the kitchen doorway.
Maya keeps typing. "Concussion protocols. The expansion draft is filed. This one's better."
"You said that about the last one."
"The last one was good. This one is the best thing I've written."
I lean against the doorway. "You said that about the last one too."
