There were white chairs set up along the ice—not on the ice, but on the floor above, bleachers draped with white fabric. There were flowers everywhere. There were lights strung from the rafters. There was a small arch where Knox and I were going to stand.
And hanging on the wall, in the place where the team roster usually went, was the memorial wall.
I had not seen it before—only heard about it from Theo Jr., who had been very excited to tell me that the rink was putting up a wall with people’s names on it. Important people. People who had mattered to hockey.
I walked closer.
The names were there. Caleb Kovak. Sam Lockhart. A dozen other names. Hockey players who had died. Who had mattered. Who were being remembered.
Caleb Kovak was at the top.
I reached out and I touched the engraving.
I said, in my head, to Knox’s brother:I’m going to love him. I’m going to love him well. I’m going to make sure his life means something.
Mira came and stood next to me. Her eyes were red. She was crying. Not sad crying. Happy crying. The kind of cryingthat came from watching your best friend marry the person who could love her the way she deserved to be loved.
I said, “The ceremony is in twenty minutes. We need to get you into position.”
She said, “I’m going to be okay. But Maple, everyone is crying. The whole town is crying and you haven’t even gotten married yet.”
The ceremony started at 4:47 p.m. The rink was packed. Every seat was filled. The light came through the high windows and illuminated the ice below, the surface reflecting the ceremony happening above it. There was something sacred about that—the ice beneath the wedding, the thing that had brought Knox to this town, the thing that was now part of their story.
Before I walked down the aisle, I saw it. The memorial wall. Sam Lockhart’s name was there in brass letters. I did not know Sam. Sam had died before I moved to Frostbite Falls. But I understood immediately that the wall was important, that this town remembered the people it had lost the way I remembered Joan. I looked at Sam’s name and I whispered a prayer for whoever had loved him, for whatever family he had left behind. I felt Theo Nash’s eyes on me from where he stood near the wall. He saw me see Sam’s name. He did not say anything. He just looked away, the way men look away from the thing that hurts. Then I took Theo Jr.’s arm and I walked down the aisle—not my father’s (he had been gone for ten years) and not technically Mira’s (she was my maid of honor and she was waiting for me at the front), but Theo Jr.’s. The five-year-old neighbor who had called Knox “Mr.Grumpus” and who had, over the last eight months, become my nephew in all the ways that mattered.
He was very serious about walking me down the aisle.
He did not smile. He looked straight ahead. He was protecting me, in the way that five-year-old boys protectthe people they love—with absolute solemnity and complete commitment.
The whole town was sitting in those white chairs.
Sue. Banks. Lily, the flower girl, who had taken her job very seriously and had scattered white rose petals like they were the most important thing she would ever do. Hudson. Wilder. Theo Nash, sitting very close to the memorial wall, his eyes on Sam Lockhart’s name. Beckham. Maddox. The ten founders. All the people who had come to my diner at midnight on Day 46 and fixed it with their own hands.
And Knox.
He was standing at the arch in a black suit that made him look like stone. Like a wall. Like the most unmovable thing I had ever seen.
He was crying. Not just tears, but the kind of crying that involved his whole body, his shoulders shaking, his jaw clenched, the kind of crying from a man who had not cried in thirteen years and now could not stop. He was crying because Caleb was not here. He was crying because Caleb would never get to marry anyone. He was crying because his brother was dead and he was alive and that was the cruelest truth he would ever know.
Quietly, the way that Knox cried—like it was a private thing that he was allowing the world to witness. His shoulders were steady. His face was steady. But tears were running down his face.
I understood.
He was thinking about Caleb.
He was thinking about all the moments that Caleb did not get to have—all the moment when he got to stand at an arch and marry the woman he loved, all the moments when he got to build a life, all the moments.
And he was having them. He was having them because he had come to Frostbite Falls and he had found me and he had decided to stay.
Theo Jr.handed me off to Knox.
I took his hands.
They were shaking.
I said, “Hi.”
He said, “Hi.”
