Across the lobby, Dante excuses himself from the scout mid-sentence. The scout waits, tracking him for half a second. I watchDante cross the floor. His path aims at the space beside her. He stops three feet away, facing the windows, coffee in his hand.
His attention stays on the windows, on the blank space in front of him.
The reporter's sentence dies mid-word. His gaze cuts from Maya to Dante, to the number on the back of Dante's warm-up jacket and the name above it. Dante's feet are planted shoulder-width apart, his body angled just enough to block the reporter's line to her. The reporter's hand drops. He takes a half-step back and recalculates the geometry of who she is standing next to.
"Good game tonight," the reporter says to Dante.
The conversation he had been building for Maya reroutes entirely.
"Thank you," Dante says.
The reporter moves on. Maya's eyes stay on the windows.
"I was handling that," she says without turning.
"Handling what?"
"Whatever you just did by standing there."
"I'm standing here because I want coffee."
"You already have coffee."
Dante looks at his cup. It is full. She's right.
"I wanted to be closer to the coffee," he says. "In case I need more."
She turns. Her eyes narrow. The flush stays high on her throat. She walks away. Dante watches her cross the lobby. The reporter is talking to someone else now, his body angled away from them.
Dante sips his coffee. His face is blank, but his jaw works once through the stillness, the same micro-tell he shows on the bench after a bad shift. He returns to the scout seamlessly, the conversation resuming as though it never broke. The whole thing took forty seconds.
Dante turns toward her laugh the way he turns toward puck movement on the ice, before thought, before strategy.
Serena is sitting with Suzanne near the booster tables, her hand on Suzanne's arm while Suzanne laughs at something. My father stands behind them with a coffee in each hand, content to hold the cups and wait for the conversation to find a seam. At the same table, Genny has a program spread open in front of her, tracking the conversation between two boosters and Addison near the tunnel. Her eyes move between them, sharp and quiet.
The lobby hums around me. Dante's head turns half an inch toward a laugh he'll never admit he heard. Maya's flush is still visible above her collar.
My hand opens. Closes. Opens again.
I slip it into my pocket beside the card and keep it there.
Chapter 12
Maya
I'm on Cole's couch in Cole's sweatshirt, with my laptop open on my lap and the senior class feature staring back at me.
Five hockey players, four years, a program rebuilt. Four hundred words in an hour, and three hundred of them are about Dante's positioning on the half-wall.
My apartment's heating died at nine. The landlord won't send anyone until morning, and it's seven degrees outside. Cole texted an hour ago from the recruiter dinner with Addison and the boosters.
Probably won't be back until late. Fridge has food.
So I used the key Cole gave me, and now I'm here for the fifth time, sitting inside a house that smells like coffee, laundrydetergent, and, beneath both, Dante's soap. Clean. Sharp. Expensive without trying too hard.
The scent is in the walls by now.
The second 413 call came three days ago. I answered that time. Seven seconds of open line. No breathing. No voice. The specific silence of someone confirming I'd pick up.
